HELEN DRUSILLA LOCKWOOD
1891 - 1971
Helen Drusilla Lockwood, Professor Emeritus of English and
from 1950 to 1956 Chairman of the Department, died in Seaford,
Sussex, England, on March 27, 1971, at the age of seventy-nine.
Miss Lockwood had retired from the college in 1956, after teach-
ing here for twenty-nine years. Although for the last decade
of her life she spent most of her time in England, she returned
several times a year to Poughkeepsie, where she kept a residence;
and she continued until her death to be interested in the affairs
of the college and in the Poughkeepsie community. Her substantial
gifts to Vassar's Center for Black Studies in 1969 and 1970, and
her confidence that the program was likely to contribute to the
whole community reminded those who knew her of her belief in the
interlocking concerns of learning in the classroom and life
outside.
Miss Lockwood was graduated from Vassar in 1912. She returned
as a member of the faculty in 1927 after years of study, travel
and teaching, which included a doctorate from Columbia in Compara-
tive Literature and participation in several sumer sessions of
the Bryn Mawr School for Women in Industry. Her published dis-
sertation was a study of French working men and the English
Chartists in literature from 1830 to 1848.
Helen Lockwood had a lively sense of a tradition of great teach-
ing at Vassar: a tradition of pioneering and originality. She
wrote of an earlier faculty that was concerned not to copy other
educational institutions but, and I quote "to recognize the
needs of people and to meet them." If at its founding Vassar's
first originality (recognizing the need of women to be educated)
was "its classical curriculum designed to be equal to that of
the best university in the country," the "standard of measure-
ment" of these early leaders, she claimed, "was life itself.
Maria Mitchell taking her students to Kansas to observe an
eclipse of the sun in 1870 was no less characteristic than
their reading Plato in Greek."
She believed, then, that there was a tradition to perpetuate
here, and she perpetuated it in her own way.
HELEN DRUSILLA LOCKWOOD (Continued)
For her the great teacher of her student days was Lucy Maynard
Salmon, the historian. "I cannot remember," Miss Lockwood wrote
years later, "when Miss Salmon's realism was not a presence
challenging all decisions." In l937 she made a dream of Miss
Salmon's come true in the Social Museum, which she initiated
and directed until economy dictated its end in l95l. The
museum was described as "drawing on many departments for direc-
tion in research and for scholarly substance, and on the community
for raw materials" to produce exhibitions that were "creative
exercises in the graphic representation of social facts."
Miss Lockwood's course in Public Discussion was announced in
the Alumnae Quarterly in 1933 as a development in the Depart-
ment of English of its "tradition of social criticism and debate."
The particular forerunners were the department's courses in
Argumentation, which she had valued highly as a student. And
there was her own enjoyable and impressive career in the extra-
curricular debates that filled the old Assembly Hall in her
student days. l9l2's Vassarion had set against her name the lines:
In arguing, the simple heat
Scorched both the slippers off his feet.
She liked, too, to think of this course, like the Poughkeepsie
Forum in which she took part, as carrying on the American tradi-
tion of debate around the cracker barrels of country stores.
In the new course there was an explicit shift from argument to
an arrival at consensus. But, however steadily held as a goal
of discussion, consensus was not a compulsion. A colleague
has recalled from faculty meetings and committees that her
"incessant and tireless wars against cant and nonsense were
perpetual encouragements to those who were weaker and less ener-
getic in battle." Old students, too, remember that conviction
was not sacrificed to consensus.
In the teaching of literature and writing, her view of English
as an art that begins in experience and gives form and vision
to it was not unique in her department. But in the subjects
she taught -- American Literature, Blake to Keats, The Contemp-
orary Press -- her strong social interests gave a particular
push to her efforts to bring her students to an understanding of
the dynamics of a work of the imagination. An examination of
language and its implications was, however, always essential to
this activity, whether it be Wordsworth's great lines on the
French Revolution, or the Declaration of Independence, or the
students’ own writing (where she declined to let them be
satisfied with easy verbal skills). Her conduct of the coordinating
HELEN DRUSILLA LOCKWOOD (Continued)
seminar in American Culture made students press back to the
roots of their generalizations through language. One of her
favorite images was of the misguided student - or faculty
member - jumping from abstraction to abstraction as from tree
to tree. Problems of communicating in the modern world; langu-
age and imagination; the philosophy of free speech -- formed the
context of writing and critical analysis in her famous course
in The Contemporary Press, which she inaugurated two years after
her arrival at Vassar and taught until her retirement. Miss
Lockwood did not o'erleap the bounds of the discipline of
English, as was sometimes charged; but in her urgency to con-
nect it with large human concerns, she was bold to stretch them.
An experimental course, Today's Cities, with New York there to
study, probably came nearest to Helen Lockwood's conception of
what Vassar should be doing. This course, offered by six depart-
ments, under her chairmanship, in 1945 and 1946 engaged the full
academic time of its twenty freshmen during the third term of
Vassar's wartime curriculum. One characteristic of the temper
of the post—war years as these teachers saw it was the growing
impatience of young people with the gulf they experienced between
the world of the classroom and the world without. Today's Cities,
Miss Lockwood wrote, could lead them to "clearer conceptions of
how the world works" and how poetry and sciences "when related
to each other can illumine its struggles and help to direct them."
Helen Lockwood was a stirring and memorable teacher. Coming from
her, the not uncommon question, "Well, what's on your minds?" was
bound to bring response, and then things began to happen. Some-
times a young woman regreted having revealed her mind's contents,
knew at once that she could not, would not, arrive at consensus
with Miss Lockwood, and went her way, perhaps never to forgive or
forget. But for others the experience was tonic. And for many
alumnae being in her courses was one of the great events of their
college years. There are those who remember Blake to Keats or
American Literature as giving them hours of rich, heightened
awareness; they instigated the Faculty-Alumnae meetings to revive
the experience. And there are those who took from her a measure
for their lives (as Helen Lockwood did from Miss Salmon); and
those who have counted on her for support as they worked out
their crises in talk or letters.
Helen Lockwood sought vision and worth for her department as
well as for students and for Vassar as a whole. Younger col-
leagues, sometimes very different from her in cast of mind and
HELEN DRUSILLA LOCKWOOD (Continued)
in feeling, often took something from her that enlarged their
conceptions of teaching and strengthened their own individual-
ity. Her extraordinary intellectual vitality and interest in
the world endured to the end of her life, as did her faith in
the development of the critical intelligence and its power to
do good. This faith was expressed in the phrasing of her will
where she wrote that, after certain bequests to friends and to
public institutions in Poughkeepsie and elsewhere, she was
leaving the "residue and remainder of her estate" to Vassar
College without restriction, "with the hope that my interest
in the quality of teaching and my concern with pioneering in
the reinterpretation and deepening of a liberal education will
be remembered."
Respectfully submitted,
Josephine Gleason
Dean Mace
Susan Turner, Chairman