4

Crucible

When Alice Freeman graduated from the University of Michigan she was only twenty-one, barely beyond adolescence. But during the next three years, until she again left Michigan for a Wellesley professorship, she faced the most difficult time of her life. During that brief interlude she assumed awesome burdens for a young woman still in her early twenties. She earned her own living; she provided for her sister's education; and she reestablished her bankrupt, ill, and probably demoralized, father in a new community where he could eventually recoup himself professionally and resume active leadership of the family. She taught school, she continued her professional training, she rented houses, arranged for the moving of furniture, attended teachers' institutes, tenderly cared for a fatally ill sister. The catalog of her cares and responsibilities is endless.

Alice Freeman's life was never characterized by a well-defined political philosophy. She was no ideologue as educator, citizen, or woman. Her approach to any problem was always pragmatic, and it was through personality rather than creed that she exerted her influence and wielded her power to shape educational opportunities for American women. That personality was crystalized in her postcollege years. All her life Alice Freeman had been a responsible, resilient, caring person. But the personality traits, the commitment, persistence, creativity, and a capacity for hard work, that were to serve her so well as a pioneer in women's higher education were tested, accentuated, and strengthened during three hard years, 1876-79.

George Palmer, who preferred to see Alice's life in two distinct and contrasting modes, one before and one after her marriage to him, described the years, from 1876 to 1879, as a time of drudgery. "She had too little fresh air and amusement, she was burdened with family anxieties." 1 He was right, and he might well have added that she also was almost always ill, exhausted, coughing, and feverish. It was not a healthy or happy time for Alice Freeman. The jobs she held were largely dictated by family considerations rather than personal needs or professional advancement.

However George Palmer also saw the whole decade, from 1876 to 1887, from college graduation to her marriage, as "her time of service. In her second period, from her entering Windsor Academy to her leaving the University of Michigan, she was--though with many distractions--accumulating knowledge and properly serving her own ends. Now [1876-87] what others require becomes her chief care." 2 For the first three years following graduation, her young life was certainly burdened by the needs and demands of others. But he errs in attributing such cares to the whole period until her marriage. Her Wellesley presidency (1881-87) with its opportunity for creative and stimulating work hardly deserves such an unmixed assessment. George used his biography of Alice to provide his own idealized and distorted view of Alice's life. He did not necessarily see her life course as she herself had experienced it.

Alice Freeman experienced no postgraduate identity crisis, at least in the sense of having to return home to be at her family's beck and call after she finished college. 3 Her family's claim was financial and their needs were so acute there was no question but that Alice must have an independent income. Only the daughters of the relatively well-off, such as Marion Talbot, Jane Addams, and M. Carey Thomas, were likely to be forced to return home. Nonetheless the family claim was there, albeit financial.

1

Alice began the crucible years happily enough. She spent the summer of 1876 in Otego with her family. Her father's financial troubles were temporarily on hold. He did not file bankruptcy until the fall of 1877. She and her sister had a few relatively carefree weeks, visiting with friends, refurbishing their wardrobes, and also preparing Ella for seminary studies and Alice for her teaching. In August they vacationed for two weeks in Philadelphia, staying with Mary Marston, a University of Michigan friend, whose father was a centennial commissioner for Wisconsin. They explored the great exposition of 1876 and its wondrous modern machines and glimpses into old world cultures. A dozen Ann Arbor friends from the classes of `75 and `76 were in Philadelphia at the same time (possibly by prearrangement), and Ella's fiance, Charles Talmadge, was on hand to serve as escort. 4 Although no letters from this summer survive, the Philadelphia excursion must have been a major adventure. This was Alice's first visit to a great eastern city. Her strong interest in history would have been stimulated not only by the fair, but also by the American historic places all around her. And the reunion with her University of Michigan friends was an added pleasure. But these were to be her last carefree days for a long while.

Alice had already accepted a teaching position for the next year at Lake Geneva Seminary, a young ladies' secondary school, in Wisconsin. William Fay Warner, another of Alice's Michigan classmates, was the son of its proprietor, and he had persuaded Alice and a male classmate, Albert Pearson, to join him on its faculty. They called themselves "the three," and obviously expected to bring a bit of the Michigan ambience to Wisconsin and preserve some of the camaraderie of their college years. Also Lake Geneva Seminary had promised a free education to Alice's sister, Ella, who was unlikely to obtain training elsewhere due to the family's financial troubles. 5 After the Philadelphia visit, the two young women traveled by train to Lake Geneva, near the Illinois border, in the lake-studded southeast corner of Wisconsin that is still a major summer resort and recreation area.

Alice, however, had made an inauspicious choice of jobs, a mistake she was not to repeat. Lake Geneva Seminary, founded in 1869 as a Christian school for young ladies, was a struggling institution. 6 Private academies, like railroads and toll roads, were overbuilt in the post-Civil War period. Although Lake Geneva's new teachers, despite their youth and inexperience, were probably better prepared with their University of Michigan degrees than those employed by many small, private finishing schools, money (and possibly enrollment) were decidedly in short supply at Lake Geneva. Alice expected a salary of $500 plus free tuition and fees for Ella as an academy student. Even that small stipend was not to be forthcoming for months. However, both young women did receive room and board.

Alice Freeman needed cash desperately. She was in debt. She had borrowed to supplement her savings from the Ottawa job to see her through her senior year. She was far too prudent to have splurged on the Philadelphia trip unless she felt her new salary would prove adequate to support her, help her family, and meet her obligations to her creditors. Instead she was without cash and soon found herself even further in debt. What is more, she did not find boarding school life very congenial. To add to her troubles, her health was far from flourishing. She also missed her Ann Arbor friends and the happy friendships of her university years. Despite the presence of two classmates, she was more lonesome for campus life than for her family. She described her experience at Lake Geneva in a letter to her friend Lucy Andrews.

The days have been very trying to me for the last month. The weather has been remarkably unpleasant almost all of the time I have been here, and about six weeks ago I took a cold which has threatened me more than any I have had in years. After several days it went to my lungs, and you can believe that it took all my strength to do my usual work, and get well without getting decidedly sick first. . . . It isn't entire rest to teach in a boarding school, even to one who is entirely well. 7

. . . it isn't so very hard or wearing. I ought and hope I shall grow rested and strong in it. But Lucy I am not used to boarding school life. I think being "slave to a bell and vassal of an hour" would grow irksome to me sometimes under any circumstances. 8

I am not. . . . but I am content and that is better. I am at work, and great tasks with high aims more than fill the years that stretch out before me until "I shall awake in His likeness and be satisfied." 9

Nobody is perfectly happy. How can we be really happy always when there is so much suffering and sin. . . . I have given up trying to be happy. I have not time to spend that way. 10

In many ways Alice Freeman's financial problems set the tone of that unhappy year. As she wrote her father, "How unfortunate that I happened to get among people who don't have any money." 11 There was no money for railroad fare home, so she and her sister stayed in Wisconsin for Christmas. As yet she had received none of her salary. Fortunately, an Ann Arbor creditor was willing to "wait a little." 12 She sent no gifts to her family and even found it difficult to put her hands on the few cents for a postage stamp or two. 13 In February, she had still received no salary but was promised that what she was owed would be paid in March. She now was also in debt to Lucy's brother, Sam Andrews, whom she had known in Ann Arbor, and she hoped she could repay him before long. 14 As she had done in Ann Arbor, she added private lessons to her other duties, tutoring young men preparing for college in Latin and Greek. 15 This brought her a little ready cash.

Meanwhile, her father's troubles were compounding. She wrote Lucy that she "had a long letter from Papa this week which made me feel very sad indeed. His health is poor, his lungs, and I fear he will have to give up practicing. I want him to. He is thinking about going back to Windsor." 16 Nor was Alice's health satisfactory. She petitioned her father for medicines and gargles for her throat, because "I am afraid my voice will entirely fail me unless I do something to counteract the constant strain on it in the schoolrooms." 17 But that was the least alarming of her symptoms. To Lucy, not to her family, she complained about the much more frightening congestion in her lungs.

But somehow, always resilient, always optimistic, Alice found the strength to enjoy the natural beauty around her. She wrote her younger sister, Stella:

The lake is spread out like a great sheet of silver in the sunshine today and looking up towards the heads on either side, the hills rise in a blue autumn mist. I never tire of looking at the water and listening to its voices. Today it is so still and glassy that it hardly breaks in ripples, even on the further bank. But sometimes when the winds are high, it groans and pounds and dashes all night long so I cannot sleep. 18

Until that winter, party politics did not figure much in her correspondence, nor would they ever in the larger sense. She was not, however, so caught up in her own problems as not to be engaged, like Americans everywhere, by the electoral crisis that followed the Hayes-Tilden contest of 1876.

I suppose this has been an exciting week in Otego as everywhere else. Flags are flying from all the principal buildings here and the town has been full since Tuesday. A letter from Ann Arbor says the college boys are out en masse every night, and the whole town is wild with excitement at every dispatch. It seems to me that I never waited for political news with such anxiety, and that no election was ever so long in being decided. 19

Alice favored Rutherford B. Hayes and was distressed at reports of southern Democrats intimidating black voters. In fact, she saw the whole mess as discrediting republican institutions in the eyes of Europe.

2

In June Alice Freeman was finally free of Lake Geneva Seminary. Although she was probably paid all or much of her salary eventually, the financial rewards had been precarious at best. In the summer of 1877 she returned to Ann Arbor to do graduate study in history. Undoubtedly another loan or some kind of financial help from Sam Andrews made Ann Arbor possible, because her savings from her salary would have gone to her family. In any case, she lived in the Andrews' household. Lucy and Alice were together again, and for a brief period she found some respite from what she called her "perplexities."

Alice Freeman's friendship with Lucy Andrews was the most intense and abiding of her emotional relationships with women other than family. It began, of course, when the two appeared on the University of Michigan campus in the fall of 1872, and they shared the same boarding house and later the same rooms. Although their friendship endured until Alice's marriage in 1887 and possibly longer, it began as a typical college girl pairing or "crush," much like those described by Helen Horowitz in Alma Mater. 20 By the time Alice and Lucy were separated for several weeks during the 1873 summer holiday, they shared caring, supportive, nurturant, and sometimes passionately fervent feelings for each other. They thought of their partnership as a Boston marriage and called each other "my little wife." The freedom with which they expressed their love for each other in the following passage is not atypical of the tone of their correspondence during these years: "I want to put my arms around you, dear, all around you, and fold you in, and hold you close to my heart that aches so for you, my little one." 21

Alice's intimacy with Lucy Andrews was a mainspring of her emotional support during the years she spent at the University of Michigan and teaching in secondary schools. Lucy, with Alice's help, joined the Wellesley faculty in 1880 and continued to teach there until 1887, and their friendship remained intimate until Alice became president. 22 Alice concealed nothing from Lucy, and Lucy seems to have confided fully in Alice. Hopes, fears, frustrations, and triumphs are poured out in their correspondence.

Lucy was engaged to be married when she and Alice met, and she expected to be wed soon after graduation. Alice was soon fighting off a plethora of Michigan suitors. Lucy still expected to be married at commencement, but her betrothal was terminated by the summer of 1877, not without trauma, for reasons I have not been able to ascertain. But Lucy's and Alice's romantic relationships with men, in true nineteenth-century fashion, had nothing to do with their feelings for women friends. Women overtly and freely expressed their love for each other, as they could never safely do with male attachments. The whole turmoil of late adolescence, commitment to a peer, separation from family, sharing new intellectual horizons, was more easily done with a close woman friend. Only one side of the Freeman-Andrews correspondence survives. Alice was not a saver (or perhaps George Palmer destroyed her accumulation), but Lucy kept Alice's letters. 23 Since Alice frequently responded to what Lucy wrote, much of what both felt and believed is clear from the letters.

Lucy Caroline Andrews was born in the Sandwich Islands. 24 She sometimes cited her birthplace as Maui and other times as Molokai. Her father, Claudius B. Andrews, had been a missionary to the islands, and later taught in a theological seminary training native clergy, but soon also became a major landowner. Alice later said in one of her published pieces, Why Go to College, that higher education brought together the daughters of New England farmers and heiresses of Hawaiian sugar plantations, and she was probably talking of Lucy and herself. Lucy's parents are rarely mentioned in their correspondence. Her mother had died before she and Alice met. Her father was alive, but very ill the winter of 1876-77.

Lucy and her brother had come to the United States (Hawaii was, of course, still an independent kingdom) in 1870. They matriculated together in the preparatory department of Oberlin College. After three months at Oberlin, Lucy transferred to the high school at Flint, Michigan, where she lived with an uncle. She received a diploma from the Flint high school before matriculating at the University of Michigan in 1872.

Lucy's brother came to Ann Arbor in 1871 and pursued literary studies over the next five years, never taking a degree, and also establishing himself in the stationery business. Lucy no doubt entered the University of Michigan at least in part because her brother, Sam, was already there. After graduation in 1876 and Alice's departure from Ann Arbor, Sam and Lucy shared rooms and kept house. It was this menage that Alice joined in the summer of 1877 when she returned to Ann Arbor for graduate work. The three young people cooked and studied and no doubt played together during that summer, as Alice also looked for a more financially rewarding job. It seems probable that Sam paid most if not all of the household's expenses.

Perhaps because she no longer expected to be married, Lucy followed Alice's example and began teaching in secondary schools that next year. She briefly taught algebra at Ann Arbor High School, whose mission in the 1870s included acting as a preparatory department for the university. The following year, she taught mathematics and Latin in Detroit Female Seminary, after which she spent a year as instructor at the Normal School in Oshkosh, Wisconsin. She joined Alice at Wellesley College in 1880, where for the next six years she taught ethics and logic. She left Wellesley when Alice resigned to be married, but continued in higher education until 1900 when she went into business as an importer of Armenian needlework at a time when the Turks' harsh treatment of the Armenian people was a cause closely embraced by organized women. From Alice's letters to her, it is clear that Lucy once more came close to marriage in 1879, but again the union did not take place. Unlike her friend, Lucy lived to be over eighty, and died in 1939 in Connecticut where she made her home with a niece.

During that Ann Arbor summer of graduate study, Alice was offered an instructorship in mathematics at Wellesley. 25 Henry Fowle Durant, Wellesley's founder, was a friend of James B. Angell and leaned heavily on Angell for advice and help on academic matters. Angell later urged Durant to bring Freeman to Wellesley, but it seems more likely that Mary Marston, Alice's University of Michigan friend who went to Wellesley on Angell's advice to Durant in 1877, triggered this offer. Wellesley may have tempted Alice but instead she had a compelling need to find a position that would permit her to assist her family. The Wellesley post may have paid as little as $500 and also required living in college and separation from her family. Through Angell, she received a better offer. In September, she began work at East Saginaw High School as preceptress at a salary of $700. 26 A month later, her sister Ella joined her as a teacher in a local elementary school. Between them they made $1,200 and could provide for the Freeman family.

That fall James Freeman assigned his assets to his creditors, but was still heavily in debt. His health was poor and Estelle's tuberculosis was again active. Alice wrote Lucy that "it seemed best that there should be an immediate change for their sakes. So I am to have them out here with me, and I suppose Fred will come when his school has closed in March. I am very anxious that he should enter college-- probably the Medical Department next fall." 27 The Freemans were to join Alice and Ella in the West.

In the 1870s Saginaw was a raw and boisterous lumber town of less than 10,000 people, home to sawmills and roistering lumberjacks. The pine forests that flourished on the shores of Lake Huron a generation earlier were now cutover in the neighborhood of urban centers like Saginaw, leaving the landscape bleak and unattractive in stark contrast to the richly wooded hills of the Susquehanna Valley. Much later, still disenchanted by Saginaw, Alice told her New England husband he would "like the pines of your native land better after a ride through the treeless stretches about this city built on sawdust and bayous." 28 In later years, Alice was to believe that Saginaw's climate, hot and humid in summer and cold and damp in winter, was unhealthful, but she seems not to have worried about the weather's effect on her and her family when she made the decision to establish the Freemans in Saginaw in 1877. She needed a job and the pay was high. What's more, Alice Freeman was joining the faculty of a public high school, which meant she would be paid and need not worry about the vagaries of private academy financing. Saginaw must have looked a dreary place, but it represented security.

The Saginaw High School was suffering from severe disciplinary problems when Freeman arrived; she suspended the leading offender, dissipated the friction, and raised scholarly standards. 29 During her two years at Saginaw as principal, fourteen students from this raw lumber town went on to college. 30 To accomplish that reformation was in itself an impressive task for so young and inexperienced an educator.

But Alice's tasks were not confined to her work. She was also encumbered by family responsibilities. Lucy had invited Alice to spend part of the Christmas holidays with her, but Alice explained:

It all sounds so sunny and restful, and I am so tired, so tired today--and I can't come. Wait a moment and listen. My school is out Friday night for two weeks. That morning my father, mother, and Estelle will get here. . . .

During the vacation I must get our people settled. I have already rented a house. They will bring most of the furniture, and you well know it will not be a light task especially in the winter . . . .

You see, dear, that my hands are very full . . . I have been in constant communication with the [bankruptcy] assignee, and have had much to do for Ella. And the school work is very wearing. There is so much of it. 31

When she wrote that letter, Alice Freeman was twenty-two, a year and a half out of college, the functioning head of her family, making all the decisions, assuming all the financial responsibilities, acting as breadwinner, debt payer, and family planner. She was dealing with crises imposed by the real world, and those crises were severe indeed. The exact nature of all of James Freeman's financial problems is never stated explicitly in surviving correspondence. The economic downturn and his lumber losses contributed. But he was also involved in a speculative enterprise, possibly the Osborn Hollow Lead mines, that proved a colossal failure. Many years later, she wrote rather fully of the 1878 family crisis to her fiancé, George Palmer, at a time when her family was again making heavy financial and emotional demands on her.

It is only about nine years since Father lost absolutely everything he had, and we all gathered together here [Saginaw], where I was teaching, with just enough money to get the family into the house which I had rented. . . . Since then, Stella's long illness and death, Ella's marriage, Fred's college course, and the making of a home here--and a part of the old indebtedness paid off, though there was no legal claim on Father--indeed no moral claim; yet Fred and I have always said--and said to them who suffered in the failure-- that if they were not paid in full, we would do so. 32

The Freeman family home in Saginaw, Michigan. (Photo credit: Ruth Bordin.)

Small Alice had adored her father, an adoration probably reinforced by his long absences from home when he was studying medicine. Her adoration and affection made his temporary physical and financial collapse in the 1870s even more difficult for her to handle. She empathized with her father, she wanted to and did protect and nurture him in every possible way, taking over his responsibilities as head of the family and assuming his debts. But she continued to need some parental care herself, at least a bottle of pills once in a while for her ailing body. It was her father who had helped her on her independent way. He had taken her to Michigan, even driven her to Binghamton to hear Anna Dickinson. He had been her example, if not her mainstay. It must have been very difficult to find parental roles reversed.

But as Alice Freeman predicted, matters did begin to come right after awhile. The family moved into a pleasant, spacious house on Saginaw's Jefferson Street. Mrs. Freeman helped augment the family income with paying boarders. Dr. Freeman set up consulting rooms and eventually created a large and prosperous practice. Stella's health improved temporarily, enough so that she hoped to attend school, and Fred joined the rest of the family in March and found work in a store. Alice's salary was raised to $800 in the fall of 1878, and the following August, Ella and Charlie Talmadge were married. 33

Alice used the wedding both to rejoice for her sister and to think about marriage. She had no serious suitor at the time. Her relationship with Abram Hostetter, a fellow Michigan student who had loaned her money, seems not to have been a romantic one, but she did receive a Christmas present from him the year she was at Lake Geneva.

On opening, I discovered that it contained the set of books entitled "Devout Classics," four in number. I wish I could describe to you the beautiful cases and exquisite binding but I must wait until you can see them. They are books for which I have long wished and than which I would prefer nothing. Three are in prose--Jeremy Taylor's "Holy Living," and "Holy Dying," and the "Imitation of Christ" by Thomas à Kempis, and one volume of poems, "The Christian Year" by [John] Keble. The only thing that troubles me is that it is such an expensive present. 34

Nonetheless she took it. It was something she really wanted. Her diary, while she lived in Saginaw, has two entries consisting only of a name with a plus mark above it on the left hand side which I suspect was her way of recording proposals. The two for Saginaw were possibly Hostetter and a male colleague. And when reporting to Lucy about Ella's wedding, Alice used the occasion to advise Lucy on how to treat her new romantic attachment:

You must tell him to sympathize in the broad sense with you and to let you be with him in little as well as great things. Then you will feel always that you are bound up together--that everything you do is full of the other. That, it seems to me, must be being married, and that you know is not the work of an hour or a year. Then no matter what comes, you can never really be separated, and two souls loving each other so, cannot drift apart. 35

Saginaw, Michigan, in the 1870s was surrounded by cutover lands. (Courtesy of Bentley Historical Library.)

Did Alice also wish for such an attachment? Was she constrained only by her promise to her parents to educate Fred, who had helped her to the extent that he could two years earlier, and now deserved his turn at education? Eventually, Ella's marriage may well have reinforced any doubts Alice had about relinquishing control over her own life. The Talmadges were chronically short of money, and childbearing seems to have left Ella in poor health. Ella's marriage was far from carefree and only added to Alice's family concerns. Unfortunately Ella lost her two children in the diphtheria epidemic of 1882.

Although Alice Freeman made her emotional commitments to women during that part of her life when she was not financially free to marry, this did not mean she eschewed male companionship. Men hovered around her, eager to convince her to marry and to ignore her commitments to her family. She did not discourage them, and she enjoyed their company. But she was very careful to keep her relationships with men within clear limits. She did not permit herself to become emotionally entangled beyond a manageable, although real and sometimes affectionate, friendship with her male friends. Women were safe. She could let herself go. She could love and commit herself without reservation because marriage was not an issue. Emotional ties to women did not threaten her economic independence and the obligations she felt to her family.

Unfortunately, Stella's improved health was only temporary, and she died in June of 1879. Alice Freeman was very attached to her younger sister. She saw her as the brightest and most beautiful of the Freeman daughters. Alice had hoped Stella too would take a university degree and enter the new world of women's work. She wrote Lucy a few days after Stella's funeral:

My heart is full but my lips are silent all these days. You know how we "sit silent" in the presence of a great sorrow and the silence of death has fallen into my life. It is a very quiet time in my soul, but oh! Lucy! Lucy! 36

George Palmer believed Alice mourned Stella all her life and heard her murmur Stella's name as she herself lay dying. 37

The "perplexities" of the past three years had all been resolved one way or another. It was time for a new beginning. Ella was married, the elder Freemans were increasingly prosperous and had bought a handsome house on Webster Street, although Dr. Freeman continued to practice on Jefferson. Fred was off to the University of Michigan Medical School, and Alice could take up her own concerns again. Alice Freeman's heaviest period of financial and emotional involvement with her immediate family ended with her departure from Saginaw in 1879. She never again lived with them for more than a few weeks at a time, and when she looked to family for rest and recreation, she preferred her maternal aunts and cousins in the Susquehanna Valley. Perhaps one reason she returned to the old Windsor neighborhood rather then her parents was that she found Saginaw's smelly lumber mills, large population of underpaid immigrant workers, and treeless, cutover surroundings far less likely than western New York's rolling, wooded, green hills to uplift her spirit.

But Alice's family remained a burden. Despite their increasing prosperity, the Freemans continued to make financial demands. She provided some assistance to Fred for a few more years, and she was always called to help during crises when the family was ill. In fact, George Palmer helped Ella Freeman Talmadge even after Alice's death. But Alice was never again so directly tied to her family's needs as she had been in the years before she went to Wellesley. In a sense, she was finally set free--a professional woman doing a professional job for herself, working hard, harder than she wanted to, but organizing her own life and calculating the costs and the rewards. She had achieved status as an independent New Woman.

Had her family not needed her help so desperately, she might well have completed an advanced degree. She could easily have been the first Michigan woman to earn a Ph.D. But after the summer of 1877, family cares absorbed all school holidays, and she could not afford to sacrifice her salary for even a semester to pursue further training.

Had she earned the degree it would not have much changed the course her life took. Those qualities most important to her career were the coping skills she developed during the crucible years. By 1879 she had met creatively and well a host of crises and problems, proved herself a successful teacher and school administrator, and demonstrated her ability to take care of herself and pursue an independent professional career. The skills she had acquired were to stand her in good stead.

Chapter Four Notes

2 Ibid.

3 Joyce Antler, "After College, What? New Graduates and the Family Claim," American Quarterly 32, no. 4 (Fall 1980): 409-34.

4 Diary, Summer 1876.

5 Ibid., Promotional brochure of Lake Geneva Seminary, January 12, 1877. Pearson's sister received the same free education.

6 Ibid., Diary, summer 1876. Lake Geneva Brochure, January 12, 1877.

7 Alice Freeman to Lucy Andrews, November 19, 1876.

8 Ibid.

9 Ibid.

10 Ibid.

11 Alice Freeman to James Freeman, December 30, 1876.

12 Ibid.

13 Ibid.

14 Alice Freeman to Sam Andrews, February 10, 1877.

15 Ibid.

16 Alice Freeman to Lucy Andrews, undated [ca. December 1876].

17 Alice Freeman to Stella Freeman, November 12, 1876.

18 Ibid.

19 Ibid.

20 Horowitz, Alma Mater, 166-67. For discussion of nineteenth-century women's relationships with women, see Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, "The Female World of Love and Ritual: Relations Between Women in Nineteenth Century America," Signs 1 (Autumn 1975): 1-30; Blanche Weisen Cook, "Female Support Networks and Political Activism: Lillian Wald, Crystal Eastman, Emma Goldman," Chrysalis 3 (1977); Nancy Sahli, "Smashing: Women's Relationships Before the Fall," Chrysalis 8 (1979): 17-27; Lillian Faderman, Surpassing the Love of Men: Romantic Friendship and Love Between Women from the Renaissance to the Present (New York: William Morrow and Co., 1982).

21 Alice Freeman to Lucy Andrews, November 19, 1876.

22 The letters Freeman wrote to Andrews were given to the Wellesley College Archives after Andrews' death.

23 Much of what I know of Lucy Andrews' life and professional career has been obtained from the University of Michigan Alumni Records Office files.

24 Diary, June 1877, 16. For material on the Andrews family see Patricia Grimshaw, Paths of Duty: American Missionary Wives in Nineteenth Century Hawaii (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1989), 1883; R. Anderson, History of the Sandwich Islands Mission (Boston: Congregational Publishing Society, 1890), 375.

25 Diary, 1877.

26 Ibid.

27 Alice Freeman to Lucy Andrews, December 15, 1877.

28 Alice Freeman to George Herbert Palmer, August 16, 1886. Wellesley Typescripts.

29 Palmer, Life, 79. Her successful direction of the school is still a Saginaw legend.

30 Alice Freeman to George Herbert Palmer, May 1, 1888. Wellesley Typescripts.

31 Alice Freeman to Lucy Andrews, November 2, 1877.

32 Alice Freeman to George Herbert Palmer, March 27, 1887. Wellesley Typescripts.

33 Diary, 1878.

34 Alice Freeman to James Freeman, December 30, 1876.

35 Alice Freeman to Lucy Andrews, August 24, 1878.

36 Alice Freeman to Lucy Andrews, July 1, 1879.

37 Palmer, Life, 81.