VIOLET BARBOUR
1884 — 1968
Violet Barbour was a member of the department of history
at Vassar from 1914 until her retirement in 1950. Those
who knew her best remember her for her combination of
intellectual toughness and personal delicacy. One of her
students has described her as "just slightly Jane Austen,
though at the same time New Yorker chic." To her friends
she was warmhearted, witty, and stimulating. To everyone
she was kind, though her charity towards a person did not
necessarily extend to his opinions. She had wide interests,
ranging from civic matters to sport. To the end of her
life she was an ardent baseball fan and would regularly
journey with friends to Brooklyn to watch and cheer the
Dodgers; reluctantly, she transferred her devotion to the
Mets when the Dodgers moved west.
But Miss Barbour's overwhelming passion was scholarship.
As an undergraduate at Cornell University, her interest
centered in history, enriched by the social sciences and
literature. Cornell, where she continued through the Ph.D.,
acknowledged her intellectual prowess with both undergraduate
and graduate fellowships. Recognition of this kind was to
continue through many years in the form of prizes, awards,
and other honors. Her first book, Henry Bennet, Earl of
Arlington, was awarded the Herbert Baxter Adams prize by
the American Historical Association in 1913, and remains
the standard authority on the subject. She was the first
woman ever to receive a Guggenheim fellowship, in 1925. B
She was elected a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society
in England, and later, when her interest in the seventeenth
century broadened to include Dutch history, was given honor-
ary membership in the Historische Genootschap, a distinction B
rarely granted to foreign scholars. Her Capitalism in
Amsterdam in the Seventeenth Century, published in 1950, has
since, as Miss Barbour herself once put it, acquired "the
dignity of paperbackery"; more significantly, it is used to
introduce students at the University of Amsterdam to their
own economic history. Her many articles in professional
journals in America, England, and The Netherlands have made
her as well known abroad as she is in this country. Indeed,
one of her Vassar colleagues once had difficulty correcting
an English scholar who spoke of Violet Barbour as "one of the
most distinguished of our English women historians."
VIOLET BARBOUR (Continued)
Teaching provided a further arena for Miss Barbour's
skills. She delighted in intellectual sparring, in
challenging and being challenged by her students. Her
original mode of expression, personal warmth, and
infectious humor found full play in the classroom. She
was shy by nature, but lost her shyness when she found
herself, as she once remarked, "facing a group of fresh-
men more frightened than I was." She was, however, a
teacher not for the many, but for the few, though she
tried to help the many if they sought her help. For
intellectually gifted students, she was the teacher and
they remained her friends for life. One has recently
recalled the "discussing, pondering, and questioning"
that was continually underway in her classes, the "excite-
ment," and the "great good humor." Another student, herself
a well-known historian, wrote: "Her style was beautiful,
her vocabulary also, but always so underplayed that it took
a sharp ear to hear what she was saying . . . she was a
mistress of irony, but . . . a kindly irony, not the
usual sharp and cutting academic skepticism . . . Tough
and delicate. You'd think she must be spared, but . . .
she never spared you, to your ultimate improvement and
growth. I left Vassar knowing how immeasurably I had been
changed by her --in every way."
Miss Barbour did not talk a great deal in faculty meetings,
but strong convictions on important matters would bring her
to her feet. Her concern with educational policy was genuine
and based on thoughtful study. In connection with our cur-
rent re-examination of the curriculum, it may be of interest
that in 1925 Violet Barbour was arguing for: "A realiza-
tion of the coherence, the dimly seen unity of knowledge,
instead of the isolation by which academic departments guard
their autonomy. "Scholars," she wrote, "should always be
trespassing upon one another, always making peaceful forays
into one another's territory to learn what is afoot there
and bring the news to astound the folk at home." She believed
that "a general plan of education valid for each and all" would
always elude, but "if knowledge is not to fall into complete
incoherence and our horizons collapse on our heads, the
liaisons between studies must be developed and strengthened."
VIOLET BARBOUR (Continued)
Miss Barbour's broad interests and sympathies found
expression in her scholarly work in a discipline which
she found neither narrow nor confining. Referring to a
piece of her own research, she once wrote: "the project
is not one of earth—shaking importance, but it has a great
deal of human nature knocking about in it and I find it
quite absorbing." Hers was the kind of scholarship which
combined imagination, sympathy, and perspective.
Mildred Campbell
Donald Olsen
Rhoda Rappaport