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- Creator
- Barbour, Violet, Elson, Ruth Miller, Ross, James Bruce
- Date
- [After 1958]
- Text
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stores ELLERY 187k - 1958 At the time of her retirement in 1939, Professor Eloise Ellery had served Vassar College for thirty- nine years and had been associated with it for over fifty. Soon after her graduation from Vassar in the class of 1897 she had been recruited as an assistant in the Department of History by Professor Lucy Maynard Salmon, and on the completion of her graduate studies she returned to Vassar as instructor, rising by successive promotions to the rank of profes- sor in 1916...
Show morestores ELLERY 187k - 1958 At the time of her retirement in 1939, Professor Eloise Ellery had served Vassar College for thirty- nine years and had been associated with it for over fifty. Soon after her graduation from Vassar in the class of 1897 she had been recruited as an assistant in the Department of History by Professor Lucy Maynard Salmon, and on the completion of her graduate studies she returned to Vassar as instructor, rising by successive promotions to the rank of profes- sor in 1916. Her colleagues recognized her fairness and good judgment by electing her to major comittees. From 1910 to 1923 she acted as Faculty Secretary, and from 1923 to 1932 she was Chairman of the Department of History. She filled these posts conscientiously and effectively but the consuming interest in her life was the study and teaching of history, and it was as a teacher that she made a lasting impression upon Vassar College. The factual record of her life is slight. Born in Rochester, N. Y., in l87h, Eloise Ellery was the only child of Frank M. and Mary Alida Alling Ellery. Her paternal grandfather came to America from Yorkshire, England. Her father, a rising member of the business community of Rochester, was to become secretary and later trustee of the Security Trust Company of that city. Miss Ellery attended the Rochester Free Academy and entered Vassar College as a freshman in 1893. Her life-long interest in history was touched off by the teaching of Professor Salmon. On receiving her A. B. degree in 1897, Miss Ellery entered the graduate School of Cornell University. Under the direction of Profes- sor H. Morse Stephens, an authority on the history of the French Revolution, she concentrated on the period of the Convention and chose as her thesis subject the study of a leader of the Gironde, Brissot de Warville. Fellow- ships fran Vassar, from Cornell, and from the Associa- tion of Collegiate Alumnae enabled her to complete work for the doctorate including a year of research in French archives and in the Bibliothdque Nationals. She received the degree of doctor of philosophy from Cornell in 1902. Her only diversion, travel, was closely related to her interest in history. She was a frequent, often solitary, and intrepid traveler in western_Europe. In 1923-2h she joined her father in a trip around the world. This ELOISE ELLERY (Continued) began formidably with a close-up of the Japanese earthquake, though not in the area of greatest danger. In Shanghai, through the cooperation of Sophie Chen Zen, Vassar 1919, Miss Ellery met and talked with prominent leaders of Young China about the liberal reforms their party then hoped to set on foot. When the Saar Valley was the warmest political spot in Europe Miss Ellery went there to obtain first-hand information on that explosive issue. In 1936 she embarked on the Odyssey cruise, visiting historic cities on the Adriatic coast, the Aegean islands, and Asia Minor. She was planning a trip through South America when the second world war intervened. She was fortunate in spending the years of her retire ment near the campus in the homes of devoted friends and colleagues, first with Dean C. Mildred Thompson and later with Dr. Jane N. Baldwin. Her erect figure continued to be a familiar sight to the college com- munity until within a few months of her death. The testimony of alumnae who had the good fortune to study European history under her direction is in striking agreement as to the foundation of her suc- cess as a teacher. Said one who graduated in l9Oh: "Her genuineness was obvious. She was true in her own scholarship and true in her interest in her students--sparing no time or thought to understand their needs and be helpful . . . ." Later, when this same student was Miss Ellery's colleague in the Department of History: "I was struck by E.E.'s abilit to stimulate each student to her best, at whatever grade of ability the student happened to be." Another alumna of the class of l9l2 recalls that there was special life in Miss Ellery's classes. "E.E. had a kind of completeness of range and view of a culture that was fundamental to all the rest of her thinking . . . In discussion there was always freshness, point and light. . . It was especially through the long paper that E.E. drew out and expected to be expressed with thoroughness and polish the whole capacity of every student." Out of this effort came the student‘ realization of "toughness and delight of intellectual adventure." Her quiet assumption that every student would do her best is what most impressed a member of e ELOISE ELLERY (Continued) the class of 1919. To an alumna from the class of '23, she was an inspiring teacher, "not personally or through charm or magnetism, but because she embodied the world of the intellect, "the eager search for and love of knowledge and the utter impartiality and integrity of the true scholar." To a member of the class of 1939, the last year that Miss Ellery taught, the intellectual excitement of her classes is still vividly remembered. Each meeting was a drama that involved every member of the group to the limits of her intellectual ability. The discussion was carefully but unobtrusively guided, within a framework of rigorous standards and respect for the contribution of each student. In the hands of Miss Ellery teaching was truly a creative art. Perhaps the best description of her impact on those she taught is that of a Chinese student: "her special gift is to open people's intellectual box, so to speak, and let its contents flow out in a beautiful abundance." She was an exacting critic, impossible to deceive with simulated learning or irrelevant flights of rhetoric, but endlessly patient with conscientious students, tolerant, witty, and kind. There is no better example of these qualities than her exhortation to a careless student: Miss Blank, "When you hoist, hoist!" The class of 1913 dedicated their Vassarion to her as one “who during our college life, Eas kept before us a high ideal of constructive scholarship." This ideal was pusued not only in the classroom and at the conference table but in a wide variety of activities. Through Miss Ellery's suggestions the great collections of sources available in print for the study of European history were acquired or augmented by the Vassar Library in order that students might have the illuminating experience of observing history as it had unfolded before contemporary eyes. Occasionally a class would stage, after intensive study of the sources, some notable historic incident, as the class in the French Revolution reenacted the Flight to Varennes, using Main Building as the Tuileries, which had in fact served Matthew Vassar's architect as a model. Or a stirring debate in the Estates General or the Convention would be presented with fire and fury in an arena in Rockefeller Hall. As faculty adviser to the Political Association Miss Ellery assisted student officers in organizing a model session of the League of Nations which was attended by some 200 delegates from 29 colleges and universities. mores ELLERY (Continued) Miss Ellery's students continued to be her students after graduation. When they returned to Vassar for reunions, or to enter daughters or even granddaughters they would seek her out to tell her what her teaching had meant to them, the rich record it had made on their thinking and living. Nor had Miss Ellery for- gotten them. To those who were especially in need of counsel and encouragement she wrote long letters mindful of their interests and of the little or big things they would like to hear about. She labored long over her letters to two alumnae living in Communist countries. She knew how eager they must be for news from the free world, but knew also that it must be communicated in a way that would not excite suspicion. She had many friends, yet those who knew her best knew little of the years before she came to Vassar or of her inner life. She had an unassailable dignity and reserve. She appeared duly at parties and meetings and listened with amused tolerance to the small talk of campus intercourse, but she never chattered or gossiped. Her time was carefully hoarded for the long labor of conferences, for reading papers, and for keeping abreast of the literature bearing on her courses. Sunday mornings were devoted to periodical- reading in the Library. Lest this absorption in the art and labor of teaching give the impression that she was stiff, aloof, unsocial, it should be added that she was gracious and cordial in manner. She had in reserve a hoard of witty stories which mellowed with age. Her thoughtfulness in calling on new members of the faculty with assurance of welcome was gratefully appreciated by the newcomers. Her courtesy was unfailing. One of the waitresses at Alumnae House, and one of the nurses at the nursing home where her last days were spent, had exactly the same tribute for her: "She was a lady." Beyond the gates of the college Professor Ellery's standing as a scholar was widely recognized. She expanded her doctoral dissertation into a full-length biography during her early years of teaching. Brissot de Warville a Study in the Histor pof the Hrench Revolution, based on eitensive'§tud§ in French archives, was puhlished in 1915 in a series comemorating the fiftieth anniversary of the founding of the college. It is still recognized as authoritative for an under- standing of the role of the Girondin party in the ELOISE ELLEHY (Continued) Convention. But Miss Ellery's heart was in teaching, not in research and writing except as it bore on teaching. During several sumers she attended the Institute of Politics at Williams College. She addressed various organizations on contemporary educational and political issues, and contributed articles and reviews to learned periodicals. From 1925 to 1931 she served as associate on the staff of Current History, her assignment being to provide brie mon y rev ews of political developments in Italy, Spain and Portugal. She was a member of the American Historical Association and in 1915 served on the important General Comittee of that organiza- tion. She was a member of the Vassar chapter of Phi Beta Kappa. In reply to a questionnaire circulated among Vassar alumnae in 1950, Miss Ellery replied to the question whether she would (or would not) choose Vassar if she were entering college then: "Knowing a good deal about Vassar and little of any other college (by per- sonal connection) I am hardly qualified to make any comparative estimate. But after having had an almost unbroken connection with Vassar for over fifty years, I can say that I have always found here an atmosphere of democracy and freedom of speech." This statement may well stand as Miss Ellery's leave- taking 0 Respectfully submitted, Violet Barbour Ruth Miller Elson James Bruce Ross XIV — M47-M50
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- Creator
- Gleason, Josephine, Pennock, Clarice, Rothwell, William, Ross, James Bruce
- Date
- [After 1961]
- Text
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MARY_VIRCINlA,HElNLEIN l903 - 1961 Mary Virginia Heinlein was born in 1903 in Bridgeport, Ohio. She must have liked her town. She insisted on going to its public schools, against the preference of her family for pri- vate ones. Years later she could bring generations of Bridge- port people alive for us with her reminiscences. Or one might hear her and an old neighbor from home telling over with relish all the institutions of higher learning in their native state. Perhaps these steady ties...
Show moreMARY_VIRCINlA,HElNLEIN l903 - 1961 Mary Virginia Heinlein was born in 1903 in Bridgeport, Ohio. She must have liked her town. She insisted on going to its public schools, against the preference of her family for pri- vate ones. Years later she could bring generations of Bridge- port people alive for us with her reminiscences. Or one might hear her and an old neighbor from home telling over with relish all the institutions of higher learning in their native state. Perhaps these steady ties with the place she first knew had a share in her passion for authenticity, in the richness and sub- stance of her experience of the wide world. It was in Bridgeport that the theatre took hold of her. She saw all the plays that Chautauqua on its circuit and stock companies on their tours brought to her part of the Ohio Valley; and early in life she began to find her way backstage to talk with the players. For her own part, this theatre-goer, who was also getting to be well-read, initiated her playmates into many dramatic ventures. So, when she came to Vassar College in l923 to enter the Junior class, after two years at Ohio State University, it was natural that her teacher, Winifred Smith, should be struck by her intui- tive and vivid understanding of Elizabethan drama, unusual in students then or now; by her quick response even to the old- fashioned Elizabethan humor and comedy, which she could interpret in the medium of American rural dialect and slang. At Vassar, she chose some of the courses that Vassar Alumnae are still talking about. One of them was Henry Nobel MacCracken's Chaucer and the Early Renaissance. Her teacher must have seen her then as he saw her long after. The other day Mr. MacCracken wrote: "The chief quality of Mary Virginia Heinlein - my student, colleague, director, and friend — was dedication to the very point of possession. For two-score years I never ceased to wonder at its intensity." It was not the Vassar actors but the debaters whom she joined as a student. Mr. MacCracken remembers this, too: "An obscure member (as we often let a transfer be) of a brilliant class, with no toehold in her glass mountain, she climbed to the presi- dency of Debate Council, then the most favored of college sports In the fall of 1925 she led her team against one from Cambridge University, whose most notable member was Richard Austin Butler (now Great Britain's Home Secretary). The issue was: Resolved that modern democracies are not compatible with personal liberty l MARY VIRGINIA HEINLEIN (Continued) The judges‘ award went to the English. But Mr. MacCracken thought they found it a hollow award: "They had come to win converts not debates; and the Vassar audience voted solidly for Mary Virginia's side." From Vassar Miss Heinlein went straight to the Theater Guild School of New York. The next six years she spent in the theatre, studying in this country and in Europe, acting in New York and in travelling companies, trying her hand at directing - managing. In these years she was deeply influenced by the psychological exploration of the experimental dramatists of the twenties; and this became one of her continuing and developing interests. Then came the lean years of the thirties. She went home to Ohio, into her father's law office, and the law school of the State University. But the fine career in the law, and perhaps in the State Legislature, that her Vassar teachers and friends began now to predict for her barely got under way. In l933 Sarah Lawrence College offered her an opportunity that she could not resist: to introduce drama into its liberal arts curriculum. It is hard for Vassar people to remember how radical and rare such an opportunity was in those days because Vassar's own pioneering in the Arts began early. For twenty years in our own Department of English, students had been tak- ing courses in playwriting and play production, and putting their learning to the test, first in the campus dramatic work- shop, then in the Poughkeepsie Community Theatre and finally in the Experimental Theatre. By the time Miss Heinlein returned to Vassar the Division of Drama had been established. She came in 1942 as Professor of Drama and Director of the Experimental Theatre. She brought with her a clear vision of what the education of women should be, and of the place of the arts in this education Her own words give the best statement of her goals as a teacher Our teaching philosophy is sensible and simple. We believe that a student's status is a dignified one, comparable to a profession, and that the student's chief business is learning. Since all things change and man's wisdom is finite, the important thing for the student to learn is hpw to learn so that her experience here may be the start of an ever continuing process of self-education. We teach, therefore, techniques of learning and hope the student acquires the taste for constant exploration. MARY VIRGINIA HEINLEIN (Continued) Our goal is the student's independence of us, an independence based on the genuine confidence which comes from knowing that one has a reasonable under- standing of oneself and the ability to do useful work, and on her realization that final responsibility for her education as well as for her direction in life rests upon herself alone. We believe, also, that for some individuals the practice of an art is an integrating and truly educating process, demanding, as it does, the involvement of the whole personality and the constant searching and testing of oneself, and calling at the same time for the utmost flexibility, originality, and spontaneity, and the most rigorous self-discipline, organization, and order. We believe that drama furnishes proper substance for the students‘ meditation, dealing, as it does, with the most important question affecting man, the meaning of his own existence; and that it presents to the mind, as do the myths, rites and dreams from which it comes those symbols and images the contemplation of which leads the human spirit toward its true and proper development. This is not a definition of permissive teaching, and Miss Heinlein's students did not have an easy time of it. "She behaved," one of them says, "As if our naivete were a fault we could shed if we chose; and she chose that we get rid of it fast." A young woman might kick hard against the pricks - hard enough for all to see. But ten years later she would write that Miss Heinlein was her great teacher, the first person she had ever known who showed "intellectual passion." She would say that in having to submit to the "authority of accuracy and precision"; to subject the development of her ideas to the rigor of logic, to suffer the explorations of her own mind, she was getting her introduction to "a great science, in the fine old Greek sense of the word." We all had a share in Miss Heinlein's educational enterprise, evenififlfie of us who never appeared on her stage, or lent the resources and insights of their own professions to her produc- tions. We were her audience, whom she made feel as essential to the theatre, between curtain—up and curtain-down, as her cast. Some of us had to take it on faith, now and then, that the play before us was, in her words, "so good that it needed doing." But in the end every one of us had his own treasury of satisfying memories of her theatre; perhaps the power and the insights in her production of The Tempest; perhaps the MARY VIRGINIA HEINLEIN (Continued) sights and sounds of young women, so moving, against the stylized sets of The Mother_of Us All; perhaps the perfection of The Blood Wedding, that “brooding folkplay of simple peasants, devoid of all decor but mere sunlight on plaster walls." All those years Miss Heinlein took her part in the national and international affairs of the theatre. She held office in the American National Theatre and Academy, the State and National Theatre Conferences, the American Educational Theatre Association, the American Society for Theatre Research. She was a delegate to Conferences of the U. S. Commission for UNESCO to the National Theatre Assemblies. Her paper for the Inter- national Congress of Theatre Scholars and Historians held in Venice in '57 was published in German by the Institute for Theatre Science of the University of Vienna, and in other languages. She gave lectures on the drama, wrote articles and reviews, made reports for Foundations. She found time to write for children a play called The Panda and the Spy, first given at Vassar in 1943, and still showing in children's theatres. She visited theatres around the world. Now and then, by way of a holiday, yet keeping her hand in, she would spend a summer in one of the stock companies. In collaboration with Mrs. Stavrides, she had almost completed a translation of the memoirs of Andre Antoine, founder of the Theatre Libre in Paris. But important as it was, her public role has for her friends and colleagues far less reality than her warm and generous personality, with its unique combination of wit and wisdom which responded so directly to the authentic, yet was so quick to unmask the false and deflate the pretentious. It has less reality than the gallant, playful and truly comic spirit that set our mundane concerns in a proper perspective. On December 20, 1961, Mary Virginia Heinlein taught her last class. She died on Christmas Day. Josephine Gleason Clarice Pennock William Rothwell James Bruce Ross, Chairman XV 333-390
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