Viola Florence Barnes, 1885-1979: A Historian's Biography 9781442628076

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VI O L A F L O RE N C E B ARN E S , 1 8 85 – 1 97 9 A HI S T O RI A N’ S B I OG R AP H Y

STUDIES IN GENDER AND HISTORY General Editors: Franca Iacovetta and Karen Dubinsky

Viola Florence Barnes, 1885–1979 A Historian’s Biography

JOH N G. R E ID

UN I VE RS I T Y O F T OR O NT O P RE S S Toronto Buffalo London

© University of Toronto Press Incorporated 2005 Toronto Buffalo London Printed in Canada ISBN 0-8020-8017-0

Printed on acid-free paper

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Reid, John G. (John Graham), 1948– Viola Florence Barnes, 1885–1979 : a historian’s biography / John G. Reid. (Studies in gender and history) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-8020-8017-0 1. Barnes, Viola Florence, 1885–1979. 2. Great Britain – Colonies – America – Historiography. 3. Historiography – United States – History – 20th century. 4. Women historians – United States – Biography. 5. Women history teachers – United States – Biography. 6. College teachers – United States – Biography. I. Title. II. Series. E175.5.B368R44 2005

907c.2c02

C2004-904236-X

University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial assistance to its publishing program of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council. This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences, through the Aid to Scholarly Publications Programme, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial support for its publishing activities of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program (BPIDP).

Contents

f o re wo r d by s ta n l e y n . kat z

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p re fac e

xi

ac know l e d g m e n t s

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1 ‘I desire that my children be strong and forceful’: Nebraska Years, 1885–1916

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2 ‘History is my life work’: The Emerging Scholar, 1916–1929

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3 ‘A very busy professional woman’: Recognition, 1929–1939

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4 ‘I want to build a good strong department’: Maturity, 1939–1950

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5 ‘There is not too much time left’: Retirement, 1950–1960

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6 ‘I have had a very happy old age’: Long Life, 1960–1979

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7 Conclusion

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notes

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bi b l i o gr ap h y

209

index

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Foreword

John G. Reid’s biography of Viola Barnes is a notable scholarly accomplishment, one of the best academic biographies I have ever read. For me it is, beyond that, an occasion for joy and sadness. I first met Vi in the early 1960s, when we began a friendship that lasted to the end of her life. I admired Vi very much, but I surely did not understand what she was all about. It is only now that I have seen Reid’s biography that I can begin to make sense of her. I received my PhD in early American history at Harvard in 1961, and taught there until 1965, when I moved to Madison, Wisconsin, and then Chicago, where I would remain for the rest of Vi’s life. But South Hadley, Massachusetts, was very much the pivot of my family’s life and travel, since it was the home of my wife’s parents, Roger and Louise Holmes. Roger spent his entire academic career, beginning in 1935, at Mount Holyoke College, where he was for most of the time until his retirement the chairman of the philosophy department. As a result, my family and I spent two summers (in the early 1960s) and innumerable weekends in South Hadley. Sometime early in this period I asked Roger if he knew a very famous colonial historian who had taught in the college many years ago – Vi’s best-known publications had appeared many years before. But Roger was puzzled. ‘There hasn’t been any famous historian here.’ Not Viola Florence Barnes? I asked. His reaction was incredulous and not altogether flattering to Vi. Well, thereby hung the tale of the relations between an older generation of women who had dominated the college and the newer generation of male professors and presidents who had infiltrated the oldest women’s college in the United States by the 1930s. But Roger and my mother-in-law, Louise, graciously invited Vi over to

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meet me one quite warm late summer afternoon. For a drink, I think. I have a distinct memory of Miss Barnes (as she was more formally known in the college community) as a handsome older woman with a defiant air, arriving in a blue suit, hat, and white gloves. ‘I am,’ she announced, ‘Viola Florence Barnes, a disciple of Charles McLean Andrews!’ Meanwhile, Roger had only modestly cleaned up after his afternoon’s gardening, and I may well have been dressed in shorts and a golf shirt. We had a drink that afternoon, and then over the next ten or fifteen years, we had many more. When I came back to South Hadley, I used to call on Vi at the lovely little house on the property she shared with Miff Howard (who also remained a friend until her retirement near us in Princeton, New Jersey, many years after Vi’s death). Scotch was Vi’s drink of choice, and I would turn up with a bottle of Johnny Walker Red Label. I cannot drink much Scotch at a sitting, but there was seldom much in the bottle when I left. We talked colonial history. Vi lived for history and she talked passionately about it. She was not entirely up to date in her reading, but she seemed to have read everything published in England and America until about the mid-1950s. She had firm and well-founded opinions about everything in the field, which for her was more or less exclusively political and legal history of the sort her mentor Andrews had taught. Vi adored Andrews, and remained proud of her Yale heritage. But she was equally proud of her Nebraska heritage. She spoke passionately about growing up on the frontier, and of the glories of landgrant university education in the Midwest. I think she regretted not having returned to teach at the University of Nebraska after receiving her PhD at Yale. As I remember, she had favoured that alternative, but Andrews had favoured the Mount Holyoke job, which would keep her closer to her sources (and perhaps correspond more closely to his own sense of rank in the teaching profession). But she had such a hard time in the early years at Mount Holyoke – the blue-backed Yale Press series on American history were the only books on American history when she started to teach there. Most of all Vi resented what she knew to be her marginalization in the profession, and at a small women’s college. She thought of herself as a major player in colonial history, as indeed she should have been in the first half of her career, when her writings were numerous and significant. But then she had spent so much time on her voluminous history of the revolutionary era (a story well told by Reid), and realized she would

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never find a publisher for it. By the time I met her, she was increasingly preoccupied with deliberate attempts by Yale (and named individuals) to prevent her from publishing and establishing her reputation. This was of course pure fantasy, as I tried repeatedly to tell her – to no avail. So revisiting Vi’s life by way of such an accurate, sensitive, and skilful biography makes me happy and sad. Reid recovers the substantial accomplishments of Barnes the historian, but he also reveals the trials of female academics in liberal-arts colleges in the first half of the twentieth century. I wish I had known Vi much earlier in her career, for I would like to have known the woman Reid describes. I knew, instead, an older and more troubled figure, and yet I treasure the memory of the hours I spent with her in person and in correspondence. I just wish I could have done something to change the behaviour of those evil people she knew were out to get her. But of course no one could. stanley n. katz princeton, nj 31 march 2002

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Preface

Viola Florence Barnes was one of the major early American historians of the interwar years. She was born in Nebraska in 1885, took her PhD from Yale in 1919, immediately began teaching at Mount Holyoke College in South Hadley, Massachusetts, and retired (continuing to live in South Hadley) in 1952. As one of the ‘imperial school’ of early American historians trained by Charles McLean Andrews at Yale, Barnes wrote extensively on New England in the colonial and revolutionary eras. Her best-known study was The Dominion of New England, published in 1923 and reprinted in 1960.1 Her reputation, however, went beyond her immediate field of specialization. Barnes served two terms as president of the influential Berkshire Conference of Women Historians (1933–8 and 1956–7), and in 1940 she was cited as one of one hundred ‘outstanding career women’ at a Women’s Centennial Congress organized by the veteran suffragist leader Carrie Chapman Catt. Viola Barnes died in 1979, aged ninety-three. Her later years brought serious frustrations, especially in her failure to find a publisher for a threevolume study of British policy in the revolutionary period that she regarded as her most important work. To the end of her long life, however, she maintained her interest in what she described in 1968 as ‘two of my favorite crusades, research and the cause of women.’2 I first took serious note of Viola Barnes in the summer of 1976. I was in the final stages of preparing a doctoral thesis on the colonies of Acadia, Maine, and New Scotland in the seventeenth century. Of course, I had read The Dominion of New England years before, but it had been just one of the many books that a hard-pressed graduate student had to try to digest. When I cited it in the draft of my thesis, a member of my committee wondered why I had chosen to use a secondary source that by

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then was fifty-three years old. Was there not a more up-to-date treatment of the Dominion? I certainly knew of more recent authors who had written about the New England history of the 1680s. And the truth was that I had cited Barnes not through any detailed engagement with her work, but because it happened to bring together conveniently the points I had wanted to substantiate. So, perhaps my committee member had a good point. The only way to make sure was to compare directly. I lined up the books on my desk, Barnes on one side and more recent studies on the other. It did not take me long to conclude that Barnes’s was still the essential work on the Dominion. The citation remained, both in the thesis and in the later published version. I did not think about Barnes very often in the years that followed, and I had no sense of her in 1976 as a person who might still be alive and writing history – which she was, even though turning ninety-one years old that summer. However, she did stick in my memory as the author of a remarkably durable work. My own career as a historian took an unexpected turn in 1978, when I was commissioned to write a history of Mount Allison University, in Sackville, New Brunswick. Among Mount Allison’s historical distinctions was its graduation in 1875 of the first woman to receive a bachelor’s degree in the British Empire. Self-conscious about my role as a critical historian, I tried not to overemphasize this highly marketable ‘first’ in my book. Nor can I pretend that the book was particularly groundbreaking on the history of women and higher education, although this was certainly one of its themes. Nevertheless, I did have my first exposure to a lively and growing historiography – authors such as Roberta Frankfort, Alison Prentice, Rosalind Rosenberg, and Phyllis Stock – and I wrote a spinoff article about the first sixty years of women’s education at Mount Allison. By the end of the 1980s, after a number of other excursions into nineteenth- and twentieth-century Canadian history, I decided to return to the early modern period. I was invited to give a lecture in 1990 at the second Planter Studies Conference at Acadia University, and chose to devote it in part to an examination of the work of ‘imperial school’ historians on the Planter and Loyalist periods of Nova Scotian history. The name of Viola Barnes promptly emerged as the author of an essay on Francis Legge, governor of Nova Scotia from 1773 to 1776. Published in the New England Quarterly in 1931, it turned out (in my mind, at least) to share with The Dominion of New England the distinction of still being a significant piece of work after many years. Accordingly, in the lecture I drew attention to ‘the work of ... [one] of Andrews’s principal

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legatees, Viola Florence Barnes, that continues deservedly to be attributed historiographical significance for Barnes’s pioneering observations on the refusal of Nova Scotia to join the American Revolution.’3 I had also embarked by this time on a collaborative project, with Emerson W. Baker, to write a biography of Sir William Phips – treasureseeker, colonial office-holder, and the governor of Massachusetts who put an end to the Salem witchcraft trials. Historiographical enquiries soon brought up a familiar name. The first professional historian to write a biographical study of Phips, in two linked articles published in the New England Quarterly in 1928, had been Viola Barnes. Our portrayal of Phips differed in several respects from that of Barnes, but we noted that she had ‘succeeded in just forty-six pages in situating Phips in imperial context while also setting previous biographies in the mythological tradition of self-made heroes.’4 By now, I was curious. Barnes’s footprints, it seemed, kept appearing in fields I sought to research. I began collecting readily available summaries of her career from biographical directories, and then during the summer of 1997 my research assistant, Jean Donovan, compiled a thorough bibliography. With the Phips project completed in 1998, I started serious research on Viola Barnes. I was not sure at that point what the final product of the research would be. It might, I thought, be anything from a modest historiographical article to (less likely) a full-length biographical study. I was confident that her association with the ‘imperial school’ would yield some worthwhile insights, especially because (as Ian K. Steele and Richard R. Johnson had already pointed out) an unusually high proportion of the graduate students of Charles McLean Andrews had been women.5 I was interested too in the wider issue of Barnes’s experience as a female academic of the twentieth century, and keen to revisit the kind of questions to which my earlier work on Mount Allison had provided an introduction. It remained to be seen, however, whether surviving sources would support enquiries of that nature. A visit during the summer of 1998 to the archives at Mount Holyoke College, where Barnes spent her entire career from 1919 onwards, dispelled any doubts about the extent and the quality of the evidence. Barnes’s own papers occupied 16.1 linear feet of shelf space, and contained material ranging from her entry to the University of Nebraska in 1902 until her death in 1979. The papers contained a wide variety of materials, but historically the most revealing was her prolific correspondence. Letters she had received from family members, fellow-historians, and many others were complemented by the copies she faithfully kept of

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her own typed letters – four large boxes of them, in fact. As she grew older, Barnes’s letters became increasingly autobiographical. I soon learned that on some subjects, notably on the reasons why her three-volume manuscript had remained unpublished, her observations could not be taken at face value. Nevertheless, in most areas her statements proved remarkably precise and accurate wherever they could be compared against other evidence. The Viola Florence Barnes papers at Mount Holyoke became the centrepiece of the evidence on which this study is based. There were also other primary sources at Mount Holyoke and elsewhere. The Mount Holyoke collections included an interview with Barnes herself, taperecorded in 1972 and subsequently transcribed, and such relevant official records as those of the department of history. Where possible too, I sought out the recollections of former colleagues and students. Other important archival collections were located at Yale and in Lincoln, Nebraska. The Yale University Archives held the papers of Charles McLean Andrews, including letters by and about Viola Barnes, as well as other sources bearing on her career there as a graduate student. The archives of the University of Nebraska yielded similar material concerning her undergraduate career, while the nearby archives of the Nebraska State Historical Society contained family papers as well as newspapers edited by her father. While in Nebraska, I also visited the city of Albion, where Barnes had spent the first seventeen years of her life and where she was buried in 1979. Gaps though there were, there was no shortage of material. So a biography it would be. But what were the questions that needed to be asked? Here – beyond, of course, the standard obligation of any biographer to be true to the subject’s life and times – I was influenced by a variety of historians. It was no surprise that the general historiography of academic and professional women in the twentieth century, and the related historiography of feminism, had moved on substantially from the time when I had last attended to it seriously in the mid-1980s. Some works of that vintage and earlier retained their importance. Carroll SmithRosenberg’s groundbreaking 1975 study of intimate relationships between women in the nineteenth-century United States resonated in the study of the social dynamics of women’s colleges, into which Viola Barnes entered in 1919.6 The essays collected in Berenice A. Carroll’s Liberating Women’s History in 1976 have also had a lasting influence, and none more so than Gerda Lerner’s portrayal of women exerting power in a variety of societal contexts even though denied equal access

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to public roles and to education.7 Estelle Freedman argued in 1979 that the founding of separate institutions – including women’s colleges such as Mount Holyoke – was integral to the efforts of women to sidestep their exclusion from male bastions. Although Freedman initially regarded this separatist strategy as losing force in the early twentieth century, new research had convinced her by 1995 that ‘separatism, or female institution building, did, in fact, survive as a reform strategy after 1920.’8 These studies prompted certain questions that were important in assessing Viola Barnes’s experience, especially as she grew to maturity in the early part of the twentieth century. In pursuing her education and in entering academic life, to what extent did she rely on separate female institutions? And insofar as she came to live her life in a predominantly female context, how did this affect her private relationships as well as her professional career? The 1980s saw a widening of approaches to women’s history in the United States. As Lerner had predicted, the study of working-class, African-American, and other ethnic minority women assumed greater prominence. While scholars debated vigorously the relative significance of gender, class, and ethnicity, substantial studies of academic and professional women – and of their approach to feminism – continued to appear. They tended to be characterized by their insistence on the interdependence of these women’s professional careers with their private and personal lives. Rosalind Rosenberg’s Beyond Separate Spheres (1982) explored the transition from the maternal feminism that informed socialreform movements at the turn of the twentieth century to a more individualistic and career-minded feminism that underwrote the unsuccessful struggle for the Equal Rights Amendment following the First World War. Rosenberg also drew attention, conversely, to the way in which the success of universities in asserting their role as gatekeepers for social advancement led to the increasing marginalization of women in academic circles.9 Ten years later Rosenberg traced a number of these themes further into the twentieth century, also examining women’s experience in a wider spectrum of social class. While portraying a feminist movement in retreat by the end of the 1920s, she also argued that among younger women a ‘privatized form’ of feminism encouraged the pursuit of sexual freedom and economic independence.10 At the same time, as Susan Ware pointed out in her study of women in the United States during the 1930s, the application of individualistic values to sexuality and the growing freedom of heterosexual relationships tended to make intimate friendships between women seem old-fashioned or even deviant.

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Whether among feminists or others, the definition of lesbianism as a recognizable orientation meant that female couples faced new and possibly unwelcome questions about the nature of their partnership.11 Nevertheless, same-gender relationships persisted. Significant for Leila J. Rupp and Verta Taylor was the number of women’s-rights activists as late as the 1950s who lived in couple relationships without claiming a lesbian identity.12 To what degree and in what sense, in view of all this, did Viola Barnes make the transition from being a suffragist to being a feminist? And how to reconcile her criticisms of other women’s emotional friendships with her own partnership of some forty-four years? When it came to more specific studies of women’s entry into professional fields, a comprehensive approach (supported by case studies including that of Mount Holyoke faculty members) was taken in 1987 by Penina Migdal Glazier and Miriam Slater. They found that the climate for women’s professional acceptance was relatively favourable during the Progressive era and the Second World War, but these were the exceptional periods that proved the rule of women’s marginalization.13 Women’s involvement in academic professions, meanwhile, generated a number of specific studies. Margaret Rossiter argued in 1982 that ready access to PhD programs had largely been gained by women by 1907, while noting that this did not prevent continuing gender discrimination in access to employment at universities.14 Works by Jessie Bernard (1964) and Patricia Albjerg Graham (1978), although their findings were effectively revised in some respects by Susan B. Carter in 1981, had defined patterns of women’s underemployment in higher education. Even at women’s colleges, Bernard argued, the proportion of female faculty members declined significantly in the early-to-middle decades of the twentieth century. For Graham, the period immediately following the First World War was crucial, as the male-centred professionalization of academic disciplines combined with the growth of large research universities to marginalize women academics and largely confine them to less prestigious institutions. Carter’s statistical analysis modified this picture somewhat, by providing a more sophisticated approach to supply and demand in university employment and by arguing that land-grant universities after 1920 actually tended to hire more women professors, but also confirmed in other respects ‘the prevalence of gender-based occupational segregation.’15 Viola Barnes entered on PhD work in 1916 and was hired at Mount Holyoke in 1919, but her employment there was precarious throughout most of the 1920s. Was she aware of going against a tide of women’s marginalization? And,

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aware of it or not, did this reality create or aggravate her personal insecurities? Other studies have focused on the experience of women academics once they had become established in their professions. For Margaret Rossiter, whose two volumes on Women Scientists in America were published in 1982 (to 1940) and 1995 (1940–72), most of the twentieth century formed a bleak period for research-oriented women. Universities discriminated systematically on the ground that hiring women researchers would damage the institution’s prestige.16 Rossiter also argued that there was relatively little research activity at women’s colleges, although this contention was challenged by other scholars. Carole B. Shmurak and Bonnie S. Handler noted that the department of chemistry at Mount Holyoke had been unusually successful in training professional chemists, while Mary Ann Dzuback demonstrated the productivity of socialscience research at Bryn Mawr from 1915 to 1940.17 These authors also argued that the quality of research at these two women’s colleges owed much to the resourcefulness of women researchers overcoming obstacles and the determination of senior researchers to foster this resilience among more junior women. This was consistent with the more general portrait of a cohesive and intellectually powerful faculty that emerged from the two studies of Wellesley College published by Patricia A. Palmieri: an article in 1983 and a book-length treatment in 1995. Unrivalled to date for analytical detail and interpretive force, Palmieri’s work showed Wellesley professors of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to come largely from middle-class professional families. They tended to be assertive women, dedicated to their disciplines and to the institution. ‘Boston marriages’ were common among them. Yet their ‘Adamless Eden’ was not perfect. The assertiveness of senior faculty could become all too easily overbearing when turned upon junior colleagues, and their research careers tended to stall prematurely.18 What effect did Barnes’s location in a women’s college have on her research? And how was she affected in turn by her relationships with senior colleagues? Her two closest senior colleagues have a historiography all their own. Nellie Neilson and Bertha Putnam have been celebrated many times as pioneer women historians. In 1919 Viola Barnes joined them to form what was in effect a three-person department of history at Mount Holyoke. Neilson, the first woman president of the American Historical Association, received brief but prominent mention in essays by Kathryn Kish Sklar on women historians in the United States (1975) and Susan

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Mosher Stuard (1987) on women medievalists.19 The careers of both Putnam and Neilson were considered in greater detail in 1979 by Margaret Hastings and Elisabeth G. Kimball. While paying graceful tribute to their own mentors, Hastings and Kimball commented on the affluent family backgrounds of both historians, provided solid historiographical analysis of their contributions to medieval history, and emphasized their role in the training of younger women as professional historians.20 More general later analyses also attributed prominent roles to Putnam and Neilson in these areas, including that of Glazier and Slater – who cited them as examples of the new wave of women professional scholars at the beginning of the early twentieth century – and Jacqueline Goggin’s 1992 study of sexual discrimination in the historical profession.21 Important as were the wider roles of Neilson and Putnam as historians, in a study of Viola Barnes’s career it is important too to place them – and Barnes herself – in an institutional context. Fortunately, as one of the influential ‘Seven Sisters’ colleges, Mount Holyoke has attracted the attention of a number of historians. Arthur C. Cole’s A Hundred Years of Mount Holyoke College remains the standard official history up to 1937, although in many ways more revealing (and more up-to-date) is Anne Carey Edmonds’s illustrated history, published in 1988.22 Specific aspects of the college’s history are explored elsewhere, notably in the important 1978 examination of the relationship between President Mary Emma Woolley and her intimate friend Jeannette Marks, by Anna Mary Wells, and in Elaine Kendall’s more general and popular 1976 account of the Seven Sisters.23 The most recent scholarship includes Deborah M. Olsen’s revealing examination of shifting values at the Mount Holyoke of the 1940s, as shown in promotional literature.24 On a larger canvas, Helen Lefkovitz Horowitz’s Alma Mater is essential in its provision of a detailed portrait of the faculty, the institutional ethos, and the physical environment into which Viola Barnes was introduced during her early career.25 How, in the light of all this, did Barnes (a Nebraskan who had severe qualms about giving up her faculty position at the University of Nebraska) fit into Mary Woolley’s Mount Holyoke? How did she relate to the likes of Neilson and Putnam, who differed radically from her not only in scholarly interests but also in social background? The more general history of women historians in the United States has been studied both in general terms and in regard to more specific chronologies: notably the impact on women of the professionalization of the discipline during the decades surrounding the turn of the twentieth century, and the pressures affecting both the numbers and the influence of

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women historians during the era immediately following the Second World War.26 Joan Wallach Scott’s Gender and the Politics of History (1988) identified both the differential status of women in the American Historical Association in the early part of the twentieth century, to which the foundation of the Berkshire Conference of Women Historians was eventually a response, and the post–Second World War lurch towards a male-dominated discourse that made Nellie Neilson’s AHA presidency in 1943 seem for a time to have been an isolated and unimportant event. For Scott, women’s marginalization in the discipline was a product not just of gender discrimination but of an epistemology that attributed primacy to the masculine role in historical causality.27 More recently, two major studies have explored further implications of professionalization, while also probing the limits of male ascendancy. In 1998, Bonnie G. Smith argued that, despite the male-oriented ‘scientific’ approach to history that accompanied the professionalization of the discipline, there was a wider intellectual terrain that was not surrendered by women to men. Women ‘amateur’ historians continued to be productive, as they had been prior to professionalization, and women professional historians – even though less numerous than the men – had their own distinctive styles of scholarship that effectively denied male-oriented grand narratives the opportunity to monopolize the discipline.28 Julie Des Jardins, in 2003, identified social and cultural perspectives that enabled women historians to redefine the past and exert an independent influence on collective historical memory. While Des Jardins emphasized the role of the many women who had little or no access to formal credentials, women academic historians also contributed through innovations in women’s history and through collective advocacy.29 Barnes lived through the later stages of professionalization, and the masculinization of the discipline following the Second World War, and she was profoundly committed to advancing the interests of women historians in the face of male hierarchy. How did she define herself – one of the earliest activists of the Berkshire Conference and its second president – as a professional historian? In what ways did her gender, consciously or unconsciously, influence her practice? There were also other, related tensions within the discipline that affected all of its practitioners. Peter Novick’s That Noble Dream (1988) identified the advance of professionalization closely with the intellectual history of the idea of objectivity, and offered an extended interpretation of historical practice in the twentieth-century United States in that context.30 Influential as the book was, it was criticized by (among others)

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women’s historians. Linda Gordon argued that the objectivity/relativism dichotomy was too simple to capture the multiplicity of a century of debates within the discipline, while Hilda L. Smith connected Novick’s view of women’s history with ‘the continuing and tired issue of why the history of white men is universal and that of African Americans, women and others is particularistic.’31 Ellen Fitzpatrick advanced the debate in 2002 by arguing that when historians of women, working-class people, and ethnic and religious minorities were given due consideration, ‘an engaged history’ could be seen as a central characteristic of United States historiography in the twentieth century.32 Viola Barnes was a historian who occasionally wrote women’s history and more frequently taught it, although she wrote more often about male political figures and never surrendered her own ideal of objectivity. Thus, the observations both of Novick and of his critics can be applied to her work. The gendered character of her professional practice is further underlined by her choice of field. Starting points for any consideration of the ‘imperial school’ are A.S. Eisenstadt’s Charles McLean Andrews: A Study in American Historical Writing (1956) and Richard R. Johnson’s 1986 article on ‘Charles McLean Andrews and the Invention of American Colonial History.’ Andrews was an upholder of the doctrine of objectivity, an innovative scholar but no controversialist, and the supervisor of many Yale doctoral students of whom a large minority were women. No simple character, he methodically advanced the careers of female former pupils but retained a paternalistic outlook on their work.33 What did Viola Barnes sacrifice in her efforts to remain true to an ideal of objectivity that was deeply rooted in one tradition of United States history but ran counter to others? And what, for her, was the cost of being a graduate student who revered Andrews and his scholarship but instinctively resisted paternalism? If all of these are the questions, nevertheless the answers must be grounded in Viola Barnes’s life. For the biographer, the life of a female academic spanning the Progressive era, the interwar years, and the changes from the 1940s to the 1970s presents distinctive challenges and demands. Fortunately there are resources to hand. Sara Alpern and the other three editors of a 1992 volume on The Challenge of Feminist Biography noted, for example, that when gender is made central to a biographical study, the integration of ‘private’ and ‘public’ facets of the subject’s life is bound to follow.34 Then Barbara Caine, exploring in 1994 the relationship between biography and feminist history, advocated the portrayal of the lives of ‘prominent or creative’ women within

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a more general framework of female experience, so as to bring out ‘their femaleness, their particular experience or understanding of the female condition, and their strategies for dealing with or breaking away from “the bonds of womanhood.”’35 Specific exemplars of biographies of women of Viola Barnes’s era can also readily be found. Of full-length biographies, an early example is the study of the historian Lucy Maynard Salmon published in 1943 by Louise Fargo Brown – who had been Viola Barnes’s predecessor as president of the Berkshire Conference.36 More recent biographical studies that contributed in their own ways to my understanding of Barnes’s life included Joyce Antler’s study of Lucy Sprague Mitchell, Jean Barman on Constance Lindsay Skinner, Ruth Bordin on Alice Freeman Palmer, Frances H. Early on Jessie Wallace Hughan, Estelle B. Freedman on Miriam Van Waters, Helen Lefkovitz Horowitz on M. Carey Thomas, Barbara Roberts on Gertrude Richardson, and Andrea Walton on Marjorie Hope Nicolson.37 None of the lives of these subjects exactly paralleled that of Viola Barnes. But she shared some elements of the experience of them all. Woman by birth and historian by adoption, much of her adult life was spent appraising and reappraising her gender and her professionalism in the effort to harmonize them. It is an effort that all of us must undertake in some form. But not all of us must give up as much to the attempt as Viola Barnes, and other women of her generation, were called upon to do.

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Acknowledgments

It is a pleasure to acknowledge the invaluable support I have received from colleagues and friends over the seven years during which this study was in active preparation. I am greatly indebted to Frances Early and Richard Twomey, who read the first draft of the entire manuscript. Both of them made thorough and well-directed comments, and their enouragement throughout has been sustaining and inspiring. Margaret Conrad and Leslie Paris also provided invaluable encouragement, while Mary Beth Norton was kind enough to read a portion of the manuscript and comment on it to my great benefit. I am very grateful too to the anonymous readers of University of Toronto Press. In the early stages of the project, Jean Donovan was a diligent and perceptive research assistant. When I began the archival research, I was fortunate enough to have the expert and ongoing guidance of Patricia Albright and Peter Carini of the Mount Holyoke College Archives and Special Collections. During research visits elsewhere, I benefited from the courtesy of the staffs of the archives of the Nebraska State Historical Society, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, the University of Nebraska at Lincoln, and Yale University. In Albion, Nebraska, Mel Andrews kindly gave up an afternoon to be my guide to the city and to the collections of the Boone County Historical Society. Closer to home, the staff members of the Patrick Power Library at Saint Mary’s University were generous and cooperative in every way. So, as ever, was Marlene Singer, secretary of the Department of History. Past and present members of the Mount Holyoke community, who had known Viola Barnes or Mount Holyoke contemporaries of hers, were also most helpful. I am especially grateful to Nancy Devine, Anne Carey Edmonds, Joseph Ellis, Harold Garrett-Goodyear, William

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Acknowledgments Preface

McFeely, and the late Wilma Pugh. Also, a number of Barnes’s former students responded to my request published in the Mount Holyoke Alumnae Quarterly by writing with their recollections of her teaching: my thanks to Elaine H. Hansen, Dorothy Hafemeyer Johnson, Cynthia H. Krusell, Charlotte Morse, Vivian Nieman, Barbara Renfrew, and Susan Eisenhart Schilling. Regarding Barnes’s relationship with Yale, I thank Edmund S. Morgan for his gracious responses to my enquiries. To Stanley N. Katz, I owe a great deal. Not only did he share with me his recollections of Viola Barnes, but he also passed along an important file of letters and original copies of some of Barnes’s works. Writing the Foreword was a further indication of the invaluable support he has provided. As the manuscript moved towards publication, I was reminded yet again of the great benefits of publishing with the University of Toronto Press. I am especially grateful to Len Husband and Barbara Tessman, and to John St James for his excellent copy-editing. Research for this project was wholly funded by grants from the Research Committee of the Faculty of Graduate Studies and Research (formerly the Senate Research Committee) at Saint Mary’s University, which support I grateful acknowledge. For permission to make use of materials under their jurisdiction, I thank the following institutions: the Bentley Historical Library of the University of Michigan; Mount Holyoke College, Archives and Special Collections; the Nebraska State Historical Society, Library/Archives Division; the University of Nebraska–Lincoln Archives; the Schlesinger Library of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study; the Wisconsin Historical Society; and Yale University Library, Manuscripts and Archives. I am also grateful to the editors of Acadiensis for agreeing to the inclusion in this book of some passages which first appeared in my ‘Viola Barnes, the Gender of History, and the North Atlantic Mind,’ Acadiensis 32:1 (Autumn 2003), 1–19. Finally, for all the usual but also very special reasons, I thank Jackie, Jane, and Robert.

VI O L A F L O RE N C E B ARN E S , 1 8 85 – 1 97 9 A HI S T O RI A N’ S B I OG R AP H Y

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CH APTE R 1

‘I desire that my children be strong and forceful’: Nebraska Years, 1885–1916

In January 1903, seventeen-year-old Viola Barns had just returned to Lincoln, Nebraska, to begin her second term at the University of Nebraska’s music school. Her father, Cass Barns, saw no need for her to be daunted by the adjustment from the rural town of Albion to the state capital. ‘I desire,’ he wrote to his daughter, ‘that my children be strong and forceful.’1 Viola had been reluctant to leave home, and traces of diffidence stayed with her into later life. Spending the best part of fourteen years in Lincoln, however, she was forceful enough to earn three university degrees, gain a junior position on the university faculty, and eventually depart for doctoral studies in history at Yale. Many years later, she would become convinced that well-qualified academic women of her generation had faced fewer career obstacles than did their successors in the late 1960s. ‘I think the men,’ she wrote in 1967, ‘have to some extent ganged up in a spirit of camaraderie to do things for other men.’2 That her own path had been neither easy nor tranquil was no denial of the justice of her observation. Yet her Nebraska years proved on the whole to be a source of the strength she required to make her way in an era when women historians were few in number and often professionally insecure. Viola Florence Barns (only when at Yale did she change the spelling to the more usual ‘Barnes’) was born at her family’s farmhouse, just outside Albion, on 28 August 1885. She was the second living child of Isabella Smith Barns and Cass Grove Barns. Her elder brother Frank was already eight years old. Her sister Ruby was born in early 1889 and her brother Donald in May 1892. Cass and Isabella’s first-born daughter had died soon after birth in 1876.3 Non-native settlement of Boone County, where Albion was situated, had begun only fourteen years before Viola

4

Viola Florence Barnes: A Historian’s Biography

Barns was born. Albion itself had been settled in 1872, and soon became the county seat. By 1884 it had some 600 inhabitants.4 Historically, this was Pawnee territory, where fields of corn, beans, and squash had flourished for many generations. More recently, Boone County had come to adjoin the only remaining Pawnee reservation in the state. The Pawnee continued for a time to hunt and forage northwards into Boone County, where both Sioux and Siouan-speaking Omaha competed and skirmished with them. By 1876, however, most Pawnee had moved west to the Indian Territory and the last of their reservation was surrendered. With non-native settlement of Boone County, Sioux and Omaha visitors became less frequent. Cass Barns recalled Omaha travellers as ‘altogether harmless.’5 In truth, there had been little armed resistance to the newcomers. This did not prevent Cass from writing of the Pawnee as ‘intolerable nuisances’ to settlers in earlier years, nor his son Frank – shortly before Viola was born – from responding to the approach of two native women by getting out his toy gun and hatchet.6 Viola Barns never faced the reality of aboriginal hostility, and aboriginal history impinged little on her own later interpretations of the imperial and colonial past, but she did breathe in stereotyped racial mythologies from an early age. Cass, Isabella, and Frank Barns had moved from Indiana to their 235acre farm, some four miles southeast of Albion, in the spring of 1881. Like many other settlers, they lived initially in a sod house. This was, after all, a ‘new frontier life.’7 In the summer, however, they moved to a newly completed frame house, which remained the family home until they moved into town in 1886.8 By profession, Cass Barns was a physician, and he continued for many years to practise part-time in Albion. Born in Indiana in 1848, he came from a line of farmers and, before qualifying as a doctor, had tried both farming and schoolteaching. In Nebraska he farmed again, harvesting corn and spring wheat, growing apples, and raising livestock.9 In 1885, however, he purchased a local weekly newspaper, the Boone County Argus (later the Albion Argus), changed its political allegiance from Republican to Democrat, and edited it for some thirteen years.10 A year before selling the newspaper in 1898, Barns had also gained a controlling interest in a steam-powered flour mill, and he ran the Albion Milling Company until 1919. He was, an out-of-town newspaper reported, ‘an enthusiastic miller,’ even succeeding in rebuilding the company after a disastrous fire in 1899. Other business interests, at varying times, included part-ownership of a drug store and a local bank directorship.11

Nebraska Years, 1885–1916 5

All the while, Cass Barns was active in politics and in community affairs. Despite a flirtation with Populism in 1890, he was a prominent local Democrat. For a time he held the patronage appointment of Albion postmaster under the administration of Grover Cleveland, but forfeited it when William Jennings Bryan failed to defeat William McKinley in 1896. Not surprisingly, as a populist-inclined Democrat and (by adoption) a Nebraskan, Barns had supported Bryan passionately. In the community, Cass ran three times for mayor of Albion – on a temperance ticket – and gained election once, in 1901. He served at various times as county commissioner, secretary of the Boone County Agricultural Association and of the county fair, chair of the board of education, and in positions in the Methodist Episcopal Church that included Sunday school superintendent.12 Cass was an affectionate but also a demanding father. ‘You are doing more work probably than others,’ he informed Viola in 1903, ‘but I expect it of you.’13 Restlessly energetic, and ambitious for his children as well as for himself, by times he could be egotistical, sentimental, or bitter at any perceived ingratitude. Earning his approval was no simple task, and in later years Viola would often find herself torn between her efforts to do so and her resentment of his demands. He was also very busy, so that practical child-raising fell primarily to Isabella. Whereas Cass took pride in ancestors who had fought in colonial conflicts ranging from the Pequot War (1636–7) to the Revolutionary War and the War of 1812, Isabella was a first-generation English immigrant. Born in London in 1852, Isabella Smith moved to the United States as a child. Her family established itself first in New York State, then in Indiana – where she and Cass met. They married in 1871. Regarded in the community as witty and astute, Isabella Smith Barns focused her energies on family and church.14 Throughout her life she wrote regularly to Viola, relaying community news and urging her daughter to get enough rest and relaxation to be able to enjoy her life.15 In the Methodist Episcopal church, Isabella was a long-serving secretary of the Women’s Foreign Missionary Society (WFMS). Her most passionate commitment, however, was to the cause of temperance and prohibition. The strength of her engagement with the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, Viola came to believe, originated with her own father’s alcoholism. Isabella had a ‘horror of liquor odors,’ and confided cryptically to her children that their grandfather had had to leave London at his elder brother’s expense because he ‘saw snakes.’16 Like many other prohibitionist women, Isabella Smith Barns also took an interest in suffragism.

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Viola Florence Barnes: A Historian’s Biography

Cass Grove Barns in youth and old age (Nebraska State Historical Society Photo Collections)

Nebraska Years, 1885–1916 7

Although the evidence hints that this was a less absorbing concern than the struggle against alcohol, Isabella reported favourably to Viola in July 1914 on an outdoor suffrage meeting in Albion. Efforts by some to disrupt the proceedings by jeering or racing automobile engines clearly left her unflustered and undismayed.17 In the Barns home also, it is difficult to imagine Isabella as anything but a stable and a calming influence. The experience of a child growing up in Albion must have paralleled that of children in many a prairie town in the Progressive era. Its economy based on its role as the chief marketing and processing centre for a county depending on wheat, corn, and cattle-raising, Albion had been joined to the Union Pacific Railroad by a branch line in 1880 and to the Northwestern Railroad in 1887.18 The town’s products were sent primarily to Omaha. Although agriculture had its ups and downs, the overall growth was enough to raise Albion’s population to some 1600 by the time Viola Barns left for Lincoln in 1902.19 For those of a boosterish turn of mind, the major events of her years in the town would have included the opening of an imposing brick courthouse, with a bandstand in the grounds, in 1897. A local and long-distance telephone system was installed in early 1900, and electric lights switched on just over two years later. Not until 1903, however, was the first automobile acquired by an Albion resident.20 More central to the lives of young people was the schoolhouse. Albion’s first high-school class had graduated in 1890. Its five members were all girls. With school attendance compulsory only to the age of fourteen, and with little effective regulation to enforce even that requirement, relatively few Nebraska students stayed beyond grade eight.21 For young men in particular, farm-related work took priority. For young women whose families had social ambitions, however, an arts education at high school held a greater attraction. Or, learning might be valued for itself. Isabella and Cass Barns appear to have instilled into their children a belief in the merits of formal education. That Viola and Ruby were jointly recognized in May 1900 as the only students of the Albion school who had been ‘neither absent nor tardy for the last four years,’ spoke of a commitment shared by both parents and children.22 Ruby, to judge by the published reports of the school, was the more successful student of the two. She appeared regularly in the first rank of her grade, while Viola did so only occasionally. In childhood and thereafter, the sisters had their disagreements. Ruby said as much when writing to Viola in Lincoln in early 1903, but she also provided a context. ‘Oh! my I am so

8

Viola Florence Barnes: A Historian’s Biography

home sick for you,’ Ruby declared. ‘Of course I don’t suppose you believe me from the way I act when you are at home, but remember you are a great tease and be sure to remember I have a temper. But my I wish you were home.’23 When Ruby signed Viola’s autograph album in 1901, she inscribed it simply as ‘your friend and sister.’24 Outside of school, Albion offered an uneven mixture of entertainments. In summer, almost the whole town might turn out for a baseball game, especially if a close local rivalry was involved.25 Summer was also the time for circuses or other travelling shows, such as Pawnee Bill’s Wild West show in 1901.26 September brought the annual attractions of the Boone County Fair. Fall and even winter would see the arrival of itinerant entertainers promising, as one troupe did in 1900, ‘Facetious Fun and Frivolity,’ or performing popular Shakespeare.27 Otherwise, Albion had to provide its own diversions, and did so through church or community events. In early 1900, the founding of a public library was proposed, and the students of the Albion school staged an ‘entertainment’ for its benefit. In a good cause too was the fundraising supper for the WFMS hosted by the Barns family in April 1899. The church also provided opportunities for the Barns family to take the occasional out-oftown excursion, as to the Methodist camp meetings held each summer. In July 1898, however, there was a more unusual trip – a week at the Trans-Mississippi Exposition in Omaha, and no doubt the furthest that twelve-year-old Viola had ever travelled from home. The exposition, opened by President McKinley with the push of an electrical button in Washington, was intended to mark the passage of Nebraska from frontier state to emerging centre of civilization and progress.28 On a smaller scale, that was also the dream of such leading citizens of Albion as Cass Barns. Yet the town continued to resist such categorizations. Local controversies over how rigorously to pursue the suppression of drinking, gambling, and prostitution indicated that entertainments in Albion were not always as genteel as church suppers, especially when the cattle drives came through. When the Gollmar Brothers’ two-ring circus came to town in July 1900, it was undoubtedly welcomed by respectable citizens. But the fact that among its most prominent claims, as it advertised to the small towns through which it toured, was that its own team of detectives would protect against thievery and gambling, showed that social conflict persisted independently of progressive aspirations.29 Viola Barns would have enjoyed a certain amount of insulation from these complexities. As a daughter of one of Albion’s few leading families, hers was a childhood in which her attendance at a friend’s birthday party

Nebraska Years, 1885–1916 9

might well be reported in the social column of her father’s newspaper.30 Among Viola’s earliest recollections was that of pestering her mother to be allowed to start school before her fifth birthday, and being allowed to spend a few days with the first-year class at the end of that school year – sharing their games and snacks at recess time.31 When she was a little older, she idolized her teenage brother Frank. Before his departure for Omaha to study medicine and dentistry, she recalled to him in later years, ‘you rushed the best girls in town, you had fine clothes and wore them well, you sent flowers and candy to your girls, and you took them places. I used to carry notes and be quite thrilled over your instructions.’32 By the age of ten, at least as her father would have it, Viola had begun to show ‘a natural talent for teaching,’ and had her own Sunday school class. Other than the appearance in the Sunday school concert program for June 1898 of ‘Little Squirrel, motion song, Viola Barns’ class,’ no details survive of her leadership. It was satisfactory enough, however, to justify a special presentation of an opal ring from the Sunday school at the time of her high-school graduation.33 High-school graduation itself came on 21 May 1901. Viola Barns was among the six students – four girls, two boys – who received their diplomas at the Albion opera house. They were presented by the chair of the school board, who as editor of the town’s Republican newspaper was an old adversary of her father’s. The speaker, a professor from Omaha, admonished the graduates that ‘God was the principal fact in the universe and that he who attempts to ignore this fact destroys in a great measure his influence for good and happiness in the world.’ With that, they were dispatched to seek their futures.34 Viola was not yet sixteen, and she stayed at home for another year. According to her own recollection, ‘I thought I had all the knowledge I would ever need, and I settled down to help save the world.’35 In the fall, she and several friends gathered Christmas toys for an orphanage in the town of York, some sixty miles south of Albion. In the spring, the same group successfully raised funds for famine relief in India by making and selling Easter eggs in various designs. As the summer of 1902 passed, however, Viola Barns was ‘ready for a change,’ and serious discussion of her future began within the family.36 The decision that she would go to Lincoln to study music was initiated by her father. She later gave two different accounts of his reasons. One attributed them to his own love for music, while the other was more utilitarian: ‘Father had said that he wanted his daughters educated in some way that would provide them with the means to make their own living if at middle age a husband died and left children to be

Viola Barns, Sunday school teacher, 1896 (Mount Holyoke College Archives and Special Collections)

Albion High School graduating class, 1901. Viola Barns at extreme left (Mount Holyoke College Archives and Special Collections)

12 Viola Florence Barnes: A Historian’s Biography

supported. He did not want his daughters to have to turn to taking in washing, yet women did not have much choice.’37 Both Ruby and Viola had sung regularly in church, and had had enough lessons on the church organ to play it publicly on occasion, and the piano at home.38 With that background, at the beginning of September, Viola departed for the University of Nebraska’s affiliated school of music, fully expecting to specialize in piano and eventually make a living as a music teacher. Lincoln in 1902 was a city of some 40,000 inhabitants. The University of Nebraska’s student body of 2000 in itself handsomely outnumbered the entire population of Albion.39 Viola Barns had understandable difficulties in adjusting, especially as she struck other students as looking much younger than her seventeen years.40 ‘Trust to time,’ Cass advised her, ‘for becoming popular and a favorite as you were when at school here. They are not apt to notice quiet small scholars at first but your studies will eventually bring you to the front.’ Ruby and ten-year-old Donald also wrote supportively.41 Before long, however, Viola was finding her feet, and it was not her studies that primarily enabled her to do so. The music school was a much smaller world than the university as a whole – 333 students, including 291 women – and the group who boarded on the top floor of the school’s building was smaller still. From the school’s former title of ‘Conservatory of Music of the University of Nebraska,’ the building was known to residents as ‘the Con.’42 The experience of mingling in a dormitory with students of her own age was new and enticing for Viola, and she and her friend Ruth Johnson soon established a formidable reputation for pranks and practical jokes. In a letter album written at the end of the 1902–3 year, one of their contemporaries recalled being awakened by the sounds of a cat fight in the corridor, only to find that it was ‘Viola and Ruth, the terrors of the Con. on a midnight parade.’ Another, many years later, remembered Viola for her ‘impish’ smile – ‘one was never certain what lay behind it, but it was apt to bode no good for the unwary.’43 With Ruth, Viola’s escapades ranged from impromptu visits to fraternity houses to midnight suppers at the Conservatory. They would quarrel, but always reconcile. It was, in short, a conventional enough student friendship. Their letters, affectionate as they were, gave no sense of romantic feelings – though it would have been unremarkable had it been otherwise, in an era when close emotional friendships were easily accepted among women students. As it was, when Ruth wrote to Viola after leaving Lincoln, it was as ‘your old chum.’44 What romantic interest Viola did have that year was apparently focused on her composition teacher (also the director of the orchestral

Nebraska Years, 1885–1916

13

department), Mortimer Wilson, with whom she had at least one major dispute during the year, although she soon afterwards confided very different feelings to Ruth. Ruth did not take it seriously. ‘“Viola in love,”’ she wrote back, ‘strikes me as being irresistibly funny.’45 If Cass Barns had known of all this, he might well have failed to see the humour. Within a few weeks of her arrival in Lincoln, he was concerned that she was being invited to dance parties. ‘You had better tell them flat out,’ he advised, ‘that you do not dance and the rules of the church you belong to disapprove of dancing.’46 By the following March, however, he wrote that he was considering sending her back to the music school for another year and counselled that, as long as she worked hard by day and got enough food and exercise, she should ‘have a jolly time every night and laugh and whoop and have all the fun you can. It will do you lots of good.’47 Viola, in reality, was already taking this advice, not only by enjoying herself in the evenings but also by pursuing her school work. Her studies were taking an unexpected turn. At the piano, she was undistinguished. Ruth later described how ‘Mozart used to suffer ... at your pitiless little hands,’ and Viola acknowledged that her hand ‘was small in the wrong places so that I could not reach an octave easily or ever strike it clearly.’48 Yet composition was a different matter. Ruth herself was a promising piano student, and her supervisor (the department head) at one point forbade her to associate with Viola, whom he regarded as a bad influence. Viola later narrated in detail what happened next, when she was called in by the same piano teacher: I went down with fear and trembling to his studio. He came toward me beaming, holding out his hand, and said he wanted to apologize for misjudging me. He said, ‘I thought you were a little devil, now I see that you are a genius.’ He said Professor Wilson, the composition teacher had shown him some of my piano pieces and after playing them he thought them remarkable.49

Then and later, Viola Barns took any suggestion of musical genius as a compliment rather than a statement of reality. Nevertheless, she began to recognize in herself creative abilities that would play some as-yetundefined role in her future. To play the piano was ‘agonizingly hard,’ while to write a musical piece came naturally: ‘I only had to sit quietly, and a theme would come to me, and all I had to do was to work it out according to the rules.’50 Genius or not, there was the possibility of a career in music other than that of a small-town piano teacher. There

14 Viola Florence Barnes: A Historian’s Biography

might also be other opportunities. Music students were not regarded as fully-fledged undergraduates at the University of Nebraska, but they were admitted to courses in the undergraduate faculties. Viola had enrolled in introductory courses in English and German, as well as in Physical Training. Her results in Physical Training were adequate though not inspiring, but in the other two she converted first-semester grades of ‘G’ (defined as 80–89%) to second-semester grades of ‘E’ (90–100%). Marks at this level remained the norm, ‘E’ more often than ‘G,’ as she pursued these subjects through her four years at the music school.51 During the summer following her first year, she asked her father to send her the following September to the university proper rather than to the music school. He refused, but promised to consider it if and when she graduated in music. On that basis, though with her major changed from piano to composition, she saw the four years through. Her compositions included songs – for which she wrote the words as well as the music – as well as a variety of settings and pieces for piano and cello, and a portion of an opera centring on the experience of the Plymouth Pilgrims. When she graduated with her music diploma in 1906, she had a mark of 100 per cent for composition.52 Partway through her second year in the music school, Viola Barns heard from her father that he had bought a house in Lincoln from William Jennings Bryan, and intended to move the family there forthwith. There was apparently some friction between Viola and her father over the house, which was in need of renovations, but eventually she took responsibility for overseeing the work of the painters and buying new bedroom furniture. According to Cass, the move was prompted in part by the prospect of better schooling for Ruby and Donald, but he also admitted to a political motive. He had run unsuccessfully for the state senate twice during the 1890s, and now sought more promising political opportunities in the capital city.53 It was not to be. Although he had opened a branch of the Albion Milling Company in Lincoln, Cass spent most weeks attending to business in Albion – especially after another destructive fire in the plant in 1905 – and spent only weekends with the family. When Viola graduated from music school in the following year, the Barns family returned to Albion to build a new and larger house.54 Viola returned with them and spent a difficult summer. Although friendships and creativity had marked her years in the music school, there had been disturbing undercurrents. In the spring of 1903, financially dependent on her father and uncertain whether he would underwrite further studies the following year – either in music or, preferably,

Nebraska Years, 1885–1916

15

as an arts undergraduate – she developed symptoms of digestive illness. This was the prelude to other similar episodes at stressful passages of her life. At the same time appeared early hints of emotional and personality disturbances that would likewise trouble her later in life. ‘Don’t turn sad, my dear,’ advised Ruth Johnson, ‘for all your friends love you as you are – a fun loving merry-hearted girl.’55 During the summer of 1906, Viola Barns found little to make her merry. ‘I think Father was wonderful to give me so expensive and prolonged an education,’ she reflected later, ‘but I have always wondered why he so much wanted me to be a musician. I think he pictured me as being the daughter who would stay home and he wanted me to have a way of making my living.’56 Viola’s efforts to recruit young children for her summer music lessons in Albion had limited success, and the small size of the town gave her scant confidence that things would improve. As usual at this period in her life, it was Ruth who responded with support – ‘I don’t blame you for feeling badly about going back to Albion’ – but also with the admonition ‘why grow despondent and indifferent[?]’ For Viola to stay in Albion would please her parents, but she would never make a successful musical career there. Could she try her hand at journalism? Perhaps she could pursue that and stay at home – but she should not be expected, Ruth concluded, to give up ‘a life’s hopes’ for the ‘mere whim’ of a parent.57 Eventually, Viola obtained her parents’ agreement – citing her father’s promise of 1903, and also holding out the possibility of using an A.B. degree to qualify herself as a schoolteacher – to her return to Lincoln. Her cause was certainly helped by Ruby’s wishing to complete high school in Lincoln, prior to enrolling at the university in January 1907.58 For a number of years, the two boarded together. For Viola, full entry to the University of Nebraska opened wide new horizons. By now, the university enrolled more than 3000 students. Not unusually for a western university, a substantial proportion of them were women – upwards of 40 per cent throughout Viola Barns’s undergraduate years.59 The university as a whole was coming towards the end of a surge in growth and elaboration, adding professional schools and – in 1896 – a graduate college with particular strength in English and history.60 Women were heavily represented in the College of Literature, Science and Arts, in which Viola was enrolled as an English major, with minors in Germanics and history. In Viola’s final undergraduate year, women and men were almost equally represented among those of the college’s 916 students who were identified by year of attendance, with another 205 women described as ‘unclassified’ – like Viola Barns herself in earlier years, they were taking courses without

16 Viola Florence Barnes: A Historian’s Biography

being fully registered as undergraduates.61 Thus, she was well accustomed to classes in which women formed the majority. Viola’s recollection in later years was of the equality between men and women on campus. ‘There were not too many women on the faculty,’ she acknowledged, ‘but this was chiefly due to the fact that there were not many trained women, that is through the PhD degree.’62 Her observation was true as far as it went, although it may have passed too lightly over her own entanglements with male authority in the student culture of the university and, later, her difficult choices as a female PhD graduate. Nevertheless, her recollection of the University of Nebraska was also undoubtedly influenced by her prominent participation in separate women’s organizations on campus, and by encounters with successful older women as mentors and role models. These included the sisters Louise and Olivia Pound, and may also have extended to the novelist Willa Cather, who had left Lincoln for Pittsburgh and then New York many years before but remained a frequent visitor to Nebraska. Cather’s departure had taken place soon after a bitter quarrel with the Pound family, which may have been indirectly prompted by the cooling of an intense friendship she pursued with Louise Pound during the early 1890s.63 The younger sister Olivia Pound was a teacher and school administrator. But it was Louise who was Viola Barns’s principal mentor; thirty-four years old in 1906, she had taken her PhD degree from the University of Heidelberg in 1900 and was now building what would be a long and distinguished career as a philologist. She was an accomplished athlete, still winning championships (on occasion, in men’s events) in tennis and golf. Pound was also a vigorous campaigner for women’s access to academic programs, graduate study, research opportunities, and professional organizations.64 Where and how Viola Barns and Louise Pound first met is not clear. It may have been while Viola was enrolled at the music school, although there is no indication in her transcript that she took any of Pound’s courses. They may also have met off-campus, since the Barns house was only eight blocks from that of the Pounds. Regardless, in 1906–7, Viola registered for Pound’s two-semester courses on the history of English literature, and followed them the next year with her courses on Old and Middle English. In her final year, she took Pound’s courses on nineteenth-century English poets, American literature, and advanced Old English.65 And for two years, Viola and Ruby boarded at the Pounds’ large Victorian residence, which by now served also as the Kappa Kappa Gamma sorority house.66

Nebraska Years, 1885–1916

Louise Pound (Nebraska State Historical Society Photo Collections)

17

18 Viola Florence Barnes: A Historian’s Biography

Viola also knew Louise Pound in another context, as she plunged with relish into the student life of the university. She made her mark first in the YWCA, joining its cabinet in 1906–7 as newsletter editor and becoming vice-president the following year.67 Her name also appeared repeatedly among the members or leaders of organizations with which Pound had a connection. She was a member of the English Club, and its secretary-treasurer in her graduation year – the club was not open to all, and she earned her membership, reported Pound, through ‘excellence in writing.’68 Viola Barns gained election in her first year to the senior and most prestigious sorority, Kappa Kappa Gamma, of which Pound was also a member. Ruby too eventually joined.69 As if this were not a sufficient mark of social acceptance, Viola was also invited prior to her graduation to join the Black Masque. This senior society for women, reputedly established by Louise Pound years before as a counterpart to an existing male organization, was restricted to thirteen members. Selected by the previous year’s graduating class on the basis of achievements as student leaders, the membership had to include seven representatives of sororities and six ‘barbs’ (unaffiliated with sororities). Barns was the member from Kappa Kappa Gamma.70 Thus, through her campus activities, she had gained a position high on the social scale of the student community. For the time being, her health problems appeared to have receded. Her personal popularity – in the sorority, her nickname was ‘Bean’ or ‘Beanie’ – had combined effectively with her organizational ability, and undoubtedly it did no harm that she was slightly older than most students and was a protégée of Louise Pound. She had prospered socially through the separation of women’s student organizations from those of men, and had travelled far from her first arrival in Lincoln as a diffident, small-town young woman. For all that, she would find within a few years that the gender-based exclusivity of Ivy League institutions, and the class-based exclusivity of eastern women’s colleges, could be harder to surmount.71 For the moment, however, Viola’s campus activities also reached beyond the older, established women’s organizations. On 18 February 1908 the suffragist and peace activist Maude Wood Park lectured at the University of Nebraska on behalf of the College Equal Suffrage League. Speaking on ‘The Debt of College Women to the Suffrage Movement,’ Park’s comments were not confined to the right to vote, but were linked to a wider feminist argument on behalf of the ‘larger women’s rights movement, ... [which] has progressed along educational, industrial, social and other lines.’72 Six days later, a University of Nebraska branch was

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formed, with Barns as its vice-president and Pound as a member of its board of directors. In its self-descriptive statement to the university’s Cornhusker yearbook, the local chapter acknowledged its inspiration by Park, but – whether purely through conviction or for strategic reasons – took a cautious view of its mission. It took a straightforwardly maternal feminist approach to the social roles of women: ‘It is rightly said that women’s sphere is mainly the home; yet there is hardly a department of the home, from matters of proper sanitation and pure food to the education of children, unaffected by municipal or national politics.’ Few women would likely seek public office, although those who wished should be entitled to do so. ‘The special bêtes noires of the suffragists,’ the statement also declared, were well-to-do anti-suffragist women who refused to act on behalf of the political rights of the millions of working women who wished to have proper representation.73 On this basis, study meetings were arranged in the spring, including one hosted by Barns at the Pounds’ house. In the following year, she continued as a member, though not as an officeholder.74 In a piece of more direct action, however, Barns and the other members of the Black Masque took the lead in a successful effort by women members of the class of 1909 to outmanoeuvre and vote down the male fraternity members who normally dominated the class elections. It still gave her satisfaction fifty-five years later, when she noted to a correspondent that ‘it was not ... an experiment in sharing, but a time when we held the power. We knew we could do it.’75 Among the results of the Black Masque’s coup was the appointment of Viola Barns, with her musical background, to write the class song. Although she decided eventually to write only the words, and set them to an existing piece of music – because, she thought, class members would have difficulty singing a tune they did not know – it was an indication that she had not abandoned her interest in composition and creative writing.76 In the spring of 1907, Ruth Johnson had written – as well as congratulating Viola on her membership of Kappa Kappa Gamma, and asking if she had yet ‘had a touch of the grand passion’ – to urge her to ‘pitch in this summer and write a book or some music.’ Almost two years later another friend, Fred Ballard, wondered similarly, ‘Do you still keep your “hand in” at story writing and musical composition?’77 By that time, Barns and Ballard had established what seems to have been her only extended female–male relationship. Fred Ballard was only a year older than Viola Barns, but was further ahead of her in university. The son of a prominent family in nearby Havelock – his father was a physician and a leading local Republican –

20 Viola Florence Barnes: A Historian’s Biography

Ballard lived at home while he attended the University of Nebraska. Graduating with his A.B. degree in 1905, he stayed on to take two years of graduate work in English. Although he did not receive a graduate degree, he completed a thesis entitled ‘The History and Tendency of American Drama.’78 The subject was a natural one for Ballard. Later one of the most successful American popular playwrights of the 1920s and 1930s, his theatrical ambition was already clear during his university years. Ballard was active in several student organizations, including the newspaper the Daily Nebraskan.79 He was a member of the Kappa Sigma fraternity and was later described by Viola simply as ‘a Kappa Sig whose frat pin I once wore.’80 Later still, Viola’s long-term companion Mildred Howard characterized the relationship more intimately. ‘I think ...,’ wrote Howard after Viola’s death, ‘that this is the only man who meant anything to her emotionally. She had a letter [received in the 1950s] from the one man in her life which told her that she was the only woman he ever cared for.’81 Ballard was also responsible for bringing Viola Barns’s life to a crossroads of sorts. Wherever and whenever they first met, they had a number of interests in common – focusing on sorority/fraternity affairs and the department of English. Each had a close association with Louise Pound.82 Although Ballard departed in 1907, spending time as a stagehand in Chicago theatres and then working on a Colorado ranch to earn money to support his writing, they corresponded regularly and visited when possible. In late 1908 Fred wrote from Chicago to ask Viola, as ‘the sanest member of the co-ed contingent’ on the committee selecting the Senior Class Play, to present the case for a play of his. She did so, although unsuccessfully. His letters also encouraged her repeatedly towards creative writing. ‘I would like you to try your hand at the short story,’ he wrote in August 1909, ‘but this is, of course, a presumption on my part, so kindly ponder.’83 They met occasionally when Fred returned to Lincoln to visit family and friends, while at least once Viola travelled to Chicago. In October 1943, she received a note from Fred, recalling that ‘33 years ago this evening you saw THE CHOCOLATE SOLDIER in Chicago. Here’s hoping you see as good a show 33 years from now.’ This meeting in Chicago, shortly before Fred departed to take up a creativewriting fellowship at Harvard, appears to have marked the high point of their relationship.84 Theatre and writing, not surprisingly, were crucial to the bond between them. Before going their separate ways – by late 1911, to judge from the dwindling of their correspondence – they discussed collaborating to write musicals. They also thought about mar-

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riage. Viola later described to a niece how she had given ‘serious consideration’ to becoming a writer, ‘not history, but literary.’ Ballard, however, envisaged writing comedies that Viola would set to music. She would, it seemed, play Sir Arthur Sullivan to his W.S. Gilbert. Eventually she refused. ‘I did not want to settle,’ she decided, ‘for a reputation as a writer of funny music ... And I was obsessed with a desire for a career, but as a writer expressing my own ideas.’ She had never regretted the decision, she added, ‘for I have had my own career, and I would never have liked the married life, nor his living here and there.’85 Fred Ballard’s play Believe Me, Xantippe! opened on Broadway in 1913. It marked the beginning of a twenty-five-year period when he was a leading Broadway playwright. At least six of his plays became motion pictures, some more than once. From 1938 onwards, though now married with two children, he began to spend increasing amounts of time at his family home in Havelock. In 1944, following his mother’s death, he moved to the Lincoln YMCA. In close companionship with E. Frank Schramm, a retired geology professor from the University of Nebraska, Ballard remained there until his death in 1957.86 Ballard and Barns ultimately spent large portions of their lives – to the end of their lives – with companions of their own gender. To what extent theirs was a sexual relationship will never be known. For a time, however, it was certainly a committed one, and it was never entirely severed until Ballard died. As Viola put it, ‘we did not break ..., for we remained friends and kept in touch the rest of his life.’87 For Viola, however, the relationship with Ballard had another important consequence. It presented her with a life plan that, however painful the decision, she rejected. To arrive at her own career choice was the obvious next step. Viola Barns had already gone some distance to clarifying her future by enrolling in the University of Nebraska’s graduate college in 1909 to take a Master of Arts degree in English. In the spring of that year, she had graduated with her A.B. degree. With a transcript consisting chiefly of ‘E’ grades, it was not a surprise when she was named in April 1909 to membership of the honour society Phi Beta Kappa.88 Commencement itself was in June, a month after the unveiling of Barns’s class song in the Daily Nebraskan. She described it years later as ‘a stern and rockbound poem designed chiefly to encourage women to be less passive.’89 The words of the song did not explicitly reveal this purpose, but the exhortations contained in the final verse could have been applied equally to suffragism or to the situation of an individual woman contemplating an academic career:

22 Viola Florence Barnes: A Historian’s Biography What matter though the beckoning gleam / Beyond us still remains! Strive on! Who longest seeketh it / The highest honor gains; Quiet and calm are not enough / To yield the happiest life, Each soul shall best come to its own / Through struggle, toil and strife.90

One absentee from commencement was Cass Barns. ‘I would like to attend your graduation but cannot,’ he wrote brusquely a few days in advance. If this indicated disapproval of Viola’s decision to stay in Lincoln for graduate work, and possibly dissatisfaction that a graduate fellowship had now made her financially independent, it did not discourage her.91 With Louise Pound as supervisor, by the spring of 1910 she had not only completed course work but had also written her thesis on ‘The Prometheus Myth in Literature.’ This fifty-six-page examination of the legend of Prometheus as portrayed in the poetry of Aeschylus and Shelley gave some indications of the thinking of a future historian, notably in situating the work of Shelley in relation to both the French Revolution and eighteenth-century English libertarian writing. However, the only overt clue to the author’s ambitions gave a different impression. The thesis, said a prefatory note, was ‘only preliminary to one of larger scope, one which is to include a study of the myth in modern European literature as well as a more complete discussion of its treatment in English literature.’92 That the proposed study would never be written owed much to the course work that Barns had taken during her A.M. year. As an undergraduate, she had taken courses in early modern English and American history. Now, as an A.M. student, she followed on by taking four courses in American history – as many as she took in English.93 In the fall of 1910, Barns returned to the university with offers of fellowships both in English language and literature and in American history. The summer had been a troubled one. Immobilized by what appears from limited evidence to have been a depressive episode, she spent June and July incommunicado in Albion and received a series of worried letters from sorority friends. ‘I do hope that by now you are beginning to get over it,’ wrote Doris Wood, her roommate the previous year: ‘You simply must come back to school. The frat couldn’t exist without you and I would have to room with a freshman. You see you simply will have to get well right away quick.’94 On her return to Lincoln, perhaps not yet fully recovered, Viola had serious doubts about a career teaching English – she was too self-conscious, she later claimed, to read poetry aloud in class – and chose the appointment in history. For

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Graduation from the University of Nebraska (Mount Holyoke College Archives and Special Collections)

24 Viola Florence Barnes: A Historian’s Biography

the following two years she shared in the teaching of introductory courses on the colonial and revolutionary periods, while also continuing to take graduate courses in the department.95 In late 1911, for reasons that are unclear, she began to consider a further change of direction. She had already taught United States history in the model high school of the university’s Teachers College since her A.M. graduation, and supervised student teachers. Now she sought a position at a high school in Omaha. Although none proved to be available, Barns pressed ahead with applying for her Nebraska teacher’s licence, and received it in April 1912.96 That she may have moved for a time away from Lincoln is suggested by her absence from the 1912 city directory. However, she was listed continuously in the university’s catalogues as a fellow in American history, complete with an office and a teaching assignment.97 Thus, it seems that high-school teaching represented for her another path contemplated but not taken. In the department of American history, her responsibilities increased. In the 1913–14 academic year, she was listed for the first time as an instructor, and taught a course of her own – an introductory course on the American Revolution and the making of the Constitution. The following year she added an advanced undergraduate course on the Revolution, and found a place for the first time on the general faculty listing for the College of Arts and Sciences. Her status and teaching assignment remained unchanged in 1915–16.98 By now, Barns had developed a firm commitment to history and was becoming impatient to move ahead professionally. Although she later recalled being treated by more senior male colleagues ‘absolutely as an equal in the department,’ the reality was that she had no degree in her own discipline, at a time when the PhD was becoming an essential qualification for a secure or senior university position.99 Twice during these years she spent summers studying at other universities. One of these was in 1915 at the University of Wisconsin, where she supported herself by working at the library while taking a lecture course from Winfred T. Root. Root, who had published in 1912 his acclaimed Relations of Pennsylvania with the British Government, 1696–1765, was on the leading edge of scholarship on colonial-imperial history. So were others whose work Barns read during the course: George Louis Beer, Herbert Levi Osgood, and Charles McLean Andrews.100 While this was not her introduction to these authors – she had read widely at the University of Nebraska in both American colonial and revolutionary history and in British history – it was an opportunity for intensive and systematic study.101 In the previous year, she had attended a summer school at Har-

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vard and had taken the opportunity to travel to Yale for an interview with Charles McLean Andrews. Encouraging her to pursue doctoral work under his supervision, Andrews went into greater detail a year later in a letter confirming that the working title of her dissertation should be ‘Massachusetts and the British Government’ and offering numerous suggestions for reading. The list of authors was headed by Root and himself. From the reading, she would ‘get atmosphere and a way of thinking in terms of imperial relationships.’ Her exact approach to the subject would be arrived at in consultation with Andrews when she reached New Haven, while the research itself would involve travel to Boston and London.102 For Viola Barns, newly turned thirty years old when she received this letter in September 1915, and beginning her fourteenth year in Lincoln, all of this was undoubtedly enticing for both personal and professional reasons. But how would going to Yale affect her position at the University of Nebraska? Her colleagues raised no difficulties on this score. Fred Morrow Fling, head of the department of European history, was as well known for his repeated forays to rural schools throughout Nebraska to drum up interest in history as he was for his work on the French Revolution. He had likely known Viola Barns since he gave the graduation address at the Albion school in 1899, and it had been on his advice that she sought out Andrews.103 Howard W. Caldwell, head of her own department of American history, was also encouraging and showed it in the practical way of arranging for leaves of absence to keep a job open for her pending her expected return from Yale. ‘I am very anxious for her to have a chance to get her doctor’s degree,’ wrote Caldwell in a strong letter of recommendation to Yale, ‘as I hope to secure her a permanent position in our university.’104 More problematically, as a female doctoral student, how would she be received at Yale? On this, she received less promising advice. Her informant was her brother Donald, who had just gone to Harvard for graduate work – also in history – after receiving his A.B. degree from the University of Nebraska. As their correspondence stretched over the years, he had progressed from signing himself as ‘little Donnie’ to being known within the family as ‘Don.’105 Responding to Viola’s enquiry about how women graduate students fared at Harvard, Don gave a wide-ranging and unencouraging answer: Of course the Harvard undergraduate has a horror of women instructors and students and no girl is permitted to attend a class in which there is a single undergraduate. Precedents are too strong. However, if it is an entirely

26 Viola Florence Barnes: A Historian’s Biography graduate class girls from Radcliffe are often admitted. Here they have no concept of a woman as a college professor ... I am inclined to believe that the Conservative professors here look on it more or less as a western innovation, such as Primary Elections, Initiatives and Referendum, Recall, and Commission government.106

Harvard, however, was not necessarily the same as Yale, and in any case Andrews – who had spent the early part of his career at Bryn Mawr – had a reputation for encouraging promising women graduate students. That he had asked during their initial meeting whether she was engaged to be married, he explained (she later recalled) by pointing out that ‘Yale did not encourage women who expected to marry, because the training was such a waste.’ The characteristic choice for professionally ambitious women between career and marriage, which she had anticipated when weighing up the possibility of a future with Fred Ballard, could not have been made more explicit.107 Even so, there was a further crucial question. How could Viola Barns finance herself at Yale? One year might be all that was needed to finish course work and launch dissertation research to be completed over a series of summers. Yet even one year would be expensive. Andrews estimated that ‘one might have eight months in New Haven and a summer in England comfortably for between $800 and 900.’108 The problem was resolved unexpectedly. An application for financial support, which she had submitted without optimism, yielded a Currier Fellowship that would cover most of her first-year expenses. Don wrote that he was ‘tickled to death’ at the news. Viola felt a mixture of elation and surprise. Either way, the road to Yale now lay open.109 Before Viola Barns set off for New Haven, however, she had to ride out some family upheavals. At least in part, they were her own creation. Increasingly now, Don was the family member in whom she confided. They had always been close, but now the seven-year difference in their ages had receded as they shared similar academic experiences and ambitions. Thus, it was Don who heard about her frustrations and irritations. Sometimes his responses were dismissive. ‘I am sorry you are not happy at [the University of] Nebraska,’ he wrote from Harvard in October 1915, in a tone that must have grated on his older sister. ‘You should cheer up and enjoy life as I do.’110 More and more, however, he commented on the volatility of her nature. In one letter he referred to her ‘meteoric temperament’; in another, while congratulating Viola on her fellowship, he predicted half-jokingly that her new-found financial secu-

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rity ‘should open up unexplored fields for you to worry about in other directions.’111 It was the fellowship, however, that indirectly brought their father to complain bitterly to Viola that ‘never in the entire Barns family has [sic] dispositions like yours been known.’112 In 1911, Cass Barns had begun again to edit the Albion Argus. Hearing of Viola’s Currier Fellowship in April 1916, and also that Don had gained a fellowship at Harvard, he wrote an article in praise of the achievements of the Barns family. Both Viola and Don found it embarrassing. Don, more philosophically, pronounced the article ‘so vain that it was funny,’ but put it down ultimately to fatherly pride.113 Viola, however, sailed into the attack. In a sarcastic letter to Cass, she ridiculed his ignorance of academic terminology, denounced the bad taste shown by what she sardonically called this ‘Hoch die Barnses,’ and lamented her loss of ‘the confidential friend you used to be.’114 His reply, in turn, decried her ingratitude and her preoccupation with ‘book learning that few can understand,’ and warned that ‘you are educating your self [sic] to go into a disagreeable, loveless lonely old maid age.’115 Viola had the last word, in a letter that brought out the longer-term origins of the quarrel. ‘Perhaps a future outburst on my part might be avoided,’ she suggested, ‘if you would never mention the subject of gratitude again. It doesn’t tend to increase that feeling in me to have you throw it up to me all the time.’ She had no regrets about choosing not to stay at home and live a life he had mapped out for her, and as for her lonely old age, ‘I have many many friends, and I love my work, and unless I am sick, I am very happy. Right in the heart of a great university, life is certainly worth living.’116 This exchange seems to have been soon forgiven if not forgotten. While it had lasted, however, it had been a sharp altercation, bringing deep-seated tensions briefly but revealingly to the surface. With her mother, Viola’s relationship remained serene – ‘she understands me better than you do, I believe,’ she told Cass – while that with her father was suffused with a troubling sense of loss on both sides.117 Yet there was more to it than that. As Don perceived, Viola Barns was not an easy or an uncomplicated individual. That she had many friends and loved her work was true, and would remain true to the end of her long life. At times, however, she seemed driven to see the worst in circumstances and in people, and her displeasure could be sudden and acerbic. As she had hinted in describing herself as happy ‘unless I am sick,’ her physical health was also a source of concern. Although she had the advantage of a constitution that would enable her at the age of eighty-seven to boast

28 Viola Florence Barnes: A Historian’s Biography

that her doctor had ‘found my general condition perfect,’ she was now entering irrevocably on a profession that made harsh demands on its female members. Also, given prevailing stereotypes that academic women were difficult to deal with, inclined to be temperamental and easily offended, Viola Barns could expect to pay a higher price than would a male historian for any traits that might seem to fit this supposed pattern. The obstacles she encountered in later years were all too real, but her responses to them were apt to provide male observers (including Don) with the opportunity to regard them as insignificant or imaginary.118 Now en route to Yale, however, Barns had cause for satisfaction. Seventeen years in Albion and fourteen in Lincoln had prepared her for a departure that would see her leaving Nebraska, never to return for more than a visit. Not that this was predictable at the time. She expected to return to the university, and her department’s similar expectation was represented in the three successive leaves of absence that kept her position open for her until 1919. Many historians before her had been brought from undergraduate and A.M. student ranks to junior faculty positions, sent away to a major university to earn a PhD, and then brought back to rise through the academic ranks.119 For Viola Barns, though, Yale would be a new threshold rather than a rite of passage. Strength and forcefulness would be required.

CH APTE R 2

‘History is my life work’: The Emerging Scholar, 1916–1929

In late 1929, more than ten years after she had graduated from Yale University with her PhD degree, Viola Barnes wrote to Charles McLean Andrews to thank him for his encouragement in applying for a research fellowship and for the ‘splendid training’ he had given her at Yale. In reality, she had more mixed feelings about Andrews than were apparent in the letter, but on her commitment to history as a vocation there was no ambiguity. ‘I have so many projects in mind,’ she declared to Andrews, ‘that if I live to be as old as Methusalah [sic] I can never finish them all. History is my life work.’ Every available moment was spent on her research, she continued, ‘and for no other reason than that I like it better than anything else in the world.’1 In arriving at this level of commitment, Barnes had been tested severely both at Yale and during the 1920s. At Yale she had her most serious confrontation yet with overt gender discrimination, and also came to feel the vulnerability of her research findings to appropriation by more established writers in her field. Going then to join the faculty at a women’s college – Mount Holyoke College, in South Hadley, Massachusetts – she found it an uncomfortable fit. Unlike her departmental colleagues, she was young, a westerner, and lacked an affluent urban background. She also had an encounter with cancer that left her physically changed, financially straitened, and for a time emotionally fragile. Yet through all of this Viola Barnes maintained her research and writing, nourishing her own dedication to her chosen profession and at the same time attracting notice from its more senior practitioners. ‘You ... [are] a scholar all through,’ wrote Wallace Notestein of Cornell in 1927 – a rarity as a prominent male academic who favoured the appointment of able women to positions at major universities, and who was unafraid to say so.2 By the late 1920s,

30 Viola Florence Barnes: A Historian’s Biography

obstacles notwithstanding, Barnes was on the verge of gaining general recognition as a major scholar. Yale was both exhilarating and disappointing. The invigoration came in part simply from working with Andrews. At fifty-three years of age, Andrews had been a late developer in American history. As a PhD graduate from Johns Hopkins in 1889, he was a product of the self-conscious professionalization of history in the United States that that university represented at the time. Although his dissertation was a study of seventeenth-century Connecticut towns, it was primarily as a medievalist that he went immediately to Bryn Mawr. While he was researching the English manorial system, it was at Columbia that scholars such as Osgood and Beer were pursuing their groundbreaking studies of relations between imperialism and the American colonies. A visit to the Public Record Office in London in 1893, however, changed the direction of Andrews’s work. There he began to discover the richness of the papers of the Board of Trade as source materials for early American history. Even so, Andrews refused to rush into publication. Much of his energy went into mining the Public Record Office and compiling a series of guides to the sources for American history there and at other British archives. By the time Viola Barnes went to Yale, however – Andrews himself having arrived there in 1910 after a three-year spell at Johns Hopkins – he had published Colonial Self-Government, 1652–1689 (1904), British Committees, Commissions, and Councils of Trade and Plantations (1908), and The Colonial Period (1912).3 The methodological foundations of Andrews’s work rested upon the meticulous use of manuscript sources and the belief that the historian could and should interpret those sources with total impartiality.4 By insisting on the importance of a transatlantic perspective on the history of the North American colonies, and on including those colonies that did not rebel in 1775, he asserted the distinctiveness of this field from the general study of United States history. Thus, Andrews has been credited – convincingly – by Richard R. Johnson as having ‘invented the colonial period of American history.’5 Although remembered historiographically as the founder of an ‘imperial school’ of early American history, with Viola Barnes as one of its members, Andrews would have been just as uncomfortable with this designation as was Barnes later in her life, especially if it were taken to imply a proBritish viewpoint. In a lengthy letter to the Harvard historian Bernard Bailyn in 1966, she explained:

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I wonder if people today realize that what they call the imperial school was not quite the straw effigy which they have built, of something that is proEnglish and anti-colonial and American ... What they [Andrews and Osgood] tried to do was to show how necessary it was to an understanding of the colonial period to have all of England’s American colonies considered, not just those that seceded, and to have some investigation of dispatches and other materials in the PRO that show how things looked from that side of the water. Both agreed that it was better to make this study stop short of the revolution, so as to see and judge the colonial period as a history and civilization in itself.6

Charles McLean Andrews was also a successful teacher of graduate students. He was both engaging and demanding. For Helen Taft Manning, who took her PhD under Andrews’s supervision in 1925 before going to Bryn Mawr, he was ‘an entirely charming and sympathetic person.’ Nellie Neilson, among his earliest doctoral students at Bryn Mawr and later a distinguished medievalist at Mount Holyoke and the first female president of the American Historical Association, recalled that for Andrews ‘one’s second best was never good enough, and sometimes neither was one’s first best.’7 Both observations were valid. Yet Viola Barnes appears neither to have been particularly close to Andrews nor to have been awed in the least by his scholarship or his demands. Their letters, until well into the 1930s, were cordial but formal communications between ‘Mr Andrews’ and ‘Miss Barnes.’8 As for his seminar, in the first year Viola’s principal complaint to her brother Don was that neither it nor her other courses, with the exception of historiography and historical methods, were sufficiently challenging. Although Don seized the opportunity to bemoan his own heavy load at Harvard – ‘if you are disappointed at your work being too easy, I can make no complaint on that score’ – he was not surprised. ‘I told you,’ he wrote in mid-October 1916, ‘Andrews [sic] courses would be a mere farce for you after having had as much as you have had in that field.’ Personal contact with Andrews, and some additional training ‘in writing History scientifically’ would be about as much as she could expect.9 For all that, there were compensations. Barnes wrote later of ‘the general atmosphere of excitement’ that was especially evident when it came to thesis research.10 In this area, Andrews exerted a crucial – but not dominant – influence. As well as initially suggesting that she work on Massachusetts–British relations, modelling her study after that of Root

32 Viola Florence Barnes: A Historian’s Biography

on Pennsylvania, he supervised her year-long efforts to grapple with this large and complex subject. Barnes, however, showed her independence by then going to Andrews with a proposal that she concentrate instead on the period of the Dominion of New England, 1686–9. Having researched the Dominion as material for her first chapter, she found enough evidence to justify an entire dissertation. The longer study, she decided, could wait until after she had taken her degree. ‘It took persuasion,’ she later recalled, but Andrews agreed.11 Andrews, in turn, was impressed with Barnes’s work, and wrote to Caldwell at the University of Nebraska to say so.12 Intellectually, therefore, the first year at Yale had its satisfactions, and there was a buoyant air about her visits to Don at Harvard, even when work was involved. ‘I hope you are planning on working on your thesis while you are here,’ he wrote in anticipation of her visit for Christmas 1916; ‘the library is generally open from 9 to 5 during the vacation. That will enable us to layoff in the evenings and do what we want to.’13 At the same time, Yale brought frustrations and dilemmas. Despite being awarded $500 fellowships in each of her final two years, Viola found New Haven expensive and had to borrow from Don. Neither her finances nor her capacity for study were helped by persistent back pain that she attributed at first to an injury but which was then traced to a slight curvature of the spine. Osteopathic treatment brought relief – but also more debt. Eye strain was a further problem. Don’s suggestion that she try ‘a good eye wash’ had the merit of being cheap, but promised little improvement.14 Don, indirectly, was a source of strain of a different kind. The United States declared war on Germany and its allies on 6 April 1917. Don, who had eye problems of his own, had already been turned down for a military commission on medical grounds, and two days after the declaration he wrote to Viola to describe their father’s reaction to this decision. Cass, characteristically, had gained appointment (by a Democratic governor, although no remuneration was involved) to chair the Boone County Council of Defense. As well as organizing war-related shipments of wheat, by the time of the Armistice he had become involved in mustering the county’s home guard and administering the draft, and in controversial efforts to silence the German-language press. While Cass chafed to be allowed to go overseas, his elder son Frank soon did so as a medical officer.15 That Don stayed at Harvard despite his father’s insistence that he should find some way of enlisting for active service, was an affront that Cass found difficult to forgive. The ongoing dispute inevitably brought stress to Viola also.16

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Viola Barnes, doctoral student at work (Photograph Collection of Viola Barnes, Class of 1919, Yale University [RU 660]. Manuscripts and Archives, Yale University)

34 Viola Florence Barnes: A Historian’s Biography

Ruby’s news in the spring of 1917, meanwhile, was quite different. Married since 1913 to a promising young banker in Lincoln, she sent photographs of their new house.17 There is no reason to think that Viola had regrets about her own single status, but the combination of Ruby’s marriage and Frank’s army commission did underline a subtle but profound division among the Barns children. While Ruby and Frank had stayed in Nebraska and now, in their different ways, were taking roles acceptable to Cass, Viola and Don had not only travelled east but also had overtly parted company with their father’s wishes in important respects. The war also had a direct professional consequence for Viola Barnes. The planned research trip to London, already in doubt in the context of submarine warfare in the north Atlantic, was now impossible for the foreseeable future. As a result, she would depend on printed collections for her sources, along with what manuscript collections existed in New England and a few transcriptions from British records. By the time she returned from a visit to Nebraska to begin her second year in October 1917, Yale itself, she wrote to her parents, was ‘like an armed camp.’ Only three history graduate students were left, all of them women.18 Other than the war, however, there were issues that were of urgent concern both for Barnes and for other women graduate students. When she had arrived at Yale in 1916, she had quickly found that women were harassed by undergraduates in their classes. They were barred from the student dining room, where even women appearing as guests were liable to be greeted by hammering on tables and the stamping of feet.19 There was no residential accommodation for women, and the ‘splendid club room’ provided by the university for its graduate students took as its explicit and exclusive purpose ‘to bring about a closer fellow feeling among the male members of the [graduate] school.’20 All things considered, Barnes later informed a correspondent, ‘when I went to Yale for Ph.D. [work] I was shocked at the attitude.’21 Like other women, she found that she could be denied enrolment in mixed graduate-undergraduate courses at the discretion of the (male) professor. Even when admitted, she recalled, ‘I had to sneak into class to avoid a riot. That is, I must come in early and sit on the back seat ... But the students were terrible.’22 Barnes was apparently too busy during her first year to put up active resistance to the slights that she and others encountered. In her second and third years, however, she presided over the Graduate Women’s Club. She focused primarily on two issues. One was that of university housing for women. During the 1917–18 year, the university treasurer was finally persuaded to provide a boarding house on an

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experimental basis. Barnes shared the property, close to the university library on Wall Street, with six other women and with eight others the following year. In November 1918 the executive board of the Graduate School went on record as favouring ‘the proper accommodation and care of women pursuing studies in the Gr[aduate] Sch[ool] and other schools of the U[niversity],’ and the experiment led eventually to permanent women’s housing.23 Another modest but significant advance came in the following year, when Barnes approached the dining-room manager at Union Hall about allowing women an alternative to the existing practice of eating at cheap restaurants in town. The manager was sympathetic, but explained that to admit women to eat at the Union ‘would bring chaos, for the men would kick the trays of dinner out of a waiter’s hands if a woman stepped inside the room.’ Eventually, he agreed to provide a table for women in a small nearby room.24 To the difficult choices that faced women PhDs, however, there were no such simple resolutions. If Viola nourished hopes that she would have a variety of palatable options, she was soon brought down to earth by Don, who wrote in November 1917 from the University of Pennsylvania – where he had recently taken up a fellowship – to discourage her from resigning her position at the University of Nebraska. ‘The way you blithely write about securing a position in the East or somewhere beside Nebraska,’ he observed, ‘is certainly different from the graduate women here.’ Even the several Bryn Mawr women doing PhD work at the University of Pennsylvania seemed to him ‘to think men professors are superior.’25 In historical perspective, this was a time of mixed messages for women doctoral graduates in the United States. The struggles for women’s admission to PhD programs had largely been won, the number of graduates was burgeoning, and it might have seemed that a wave of new opportunities would inevitably develop.26 However, it remained difficult for women to gain employment at coeducational institutions, ranging to near-impossibility at institutions of the highest prestige or at senior academic rank. Even at the University of Nebraska, where Louise Pound for one would have no truck with rosecoloured visions of equality, a report published in 1920 by the local branch of the Association of Collegiate Alumnae identified discriminatory practices and documented a decline in the proportion of women faculty over the preceding five years from 23.1 per cent to 16.2 per cent.27 More generally, as Rosalind Rosenberg has pointed out, the success of universities in establishing themselves during the Progressive era as prestigious institutions acting as gatekeepers for the professions had been counterproductive for women. University positions became more

Viola Barnes, centre, with Yale friends (Photograph Collection of Viola Barnes, Class of 1919, Yale University [RU 660]. Manuscripts and Archives, Yale University)

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attractive for career-minded males, and women faced marginalization.28 In working towards her PhD, Viola Barnes was swimming with the tide. When she looked ahead to using it to develop her career as a historian, she was not. In the meantime, she found an alternative to academic pursuits by resuming her creative writing. In late 1917 or early 1918, she submitted a number of poems to Harriet Monroe, editor of the Chicago-based Poetry magazine. They showed Barnes struggling with her transplantation from west to east. One of the poems evoked the ‘unbroken curves’ of the Nebraska sand hills in the spring, where lean cattle stood listlessly ‘In muddy bankless pools / Where water soaked up into the land / Like ink on a blotter,’ and a house was almost invisible because ‘It was submerged in the vast drab of the hills.’ Two contrasting poems spoke of conflicting senses of place. In one, entitled ‘Nostalgia,’ a prairie wild rose now growing in ‘a quaint old-fashioned garden’ observed the more delicate flowers in their ‘tidy little beds.’ Shunning the loneliness of ‘their backwoods cousin,’ the other flowers ‘draw their dainty skirts aside / Lest they be torn on my prickly stems.’ But they existed only because of the gardener’s care – ‘their beauty is like a perfect dream’ – by contrast with the robust and freedom-loving wild rose ‘in the dear soil of my native land.’ In ‘Experience,’ the unnamed subject of the poem rejected the green sterility of a garden and sought other landscapes. Among them were prairie and ocean outlooks, but the one that brought a surge of joy by its vigour and volatility was ‘where great cities belch forth / Huge black clouds of smoke’ and where ‘drab streets seethe / With jostling people, noisy trucks / Streetcars screeching on unoiled curves, / Sleek limousines.’ The compositions succeeded in attracting the personal attention of Monroe, who returned them with muted praise but more pointed criticism: ‘some of these interesting but you don’t quite make poems of them.’ Discouraged, Barnes put them away, to rediscover them when going through some papers thirty-four years later. Later still, she reproached herself for not persevering.29 The question in 1918 and the following year, however, was whether Barnes would indeed return to her native soil or seek a new landscape. It was a question on which Charles McLean Andrews had decided views. Barnes’s PhD near completion in early 1919, he could see no good reason for her to return to Nebraska. In his estimation, what she needed was to stay in New England. Here, she would be conveniently close to the research libraries and manuscript collections of Boston, and only a few days by steamship from the even richer archival pastures of

The prairie rose in an old-fashioned garden, ca. 1918 (Photograph Collection of Viola Barnes, Class of 1919, Yale University [RU 660]. Manuscripts and Archives, Yale University)

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the Public Record Office and British Museum. And he knew just the place where she could secure a position. All it needed was for him to respond positively to a request from his former doctoral student Nellie Neilson at Mount Holyoke College, who had asked him to recommend a candidate in United States history.30 Barnes would take some convincing, but in the meantime when Neilson invited her to visit Mount Holyoke in early April she agreed to go. The visit, Barnes felt, was not a great success. She did not take to Neilson, and felt no great warmth in return. She was also mystified when the appointment and its duties were barely mentioned. ‘And I went back,’ she recalled, ‘and told Mr Andrews nothing doing, I wouldn’t consider it. I thought she [Neilson] wanted only to see whether I ate with my knife or not and that I was not going to take it even if she offered it.’ A few days later, however, a telegram offered Barnes an instructorship at Mount Holyoke, and Andrews’s considerable powers of persuasion began to be deployed.31 The decision was a momentous one for Viola Barnes, all the more so because it was perfectly clear that it would be irrevocable. Especially given the recent erosion of faculty women at the University of Nebraska, resigning her position there would effectively close the door for all time. This when she had every chance of an associate professorship at a much higher salary than the mere instructorship at Mount Holyoke. To compound matters, to accept appointment at a women’s college carried risks of its own. Research would undoubtedly be possible – Mary Woolley, president of the college since 1900, had made a point of encouraging research and publication, and the success of Professors Emma Perry Carr and Dorothy Hahn in the department of chemistry provided an impressive example of the results.32 However, researchers at women’s colleges still had to struggle against the perception that their institutions lacked the scholarly weight and depth of the major universities. As Patricia Palmieri has pointed out regarding Wellesley College, it was not uncommon for promising academics at women’s colleges to see their careers flag as the burden of combating unfavourable platitudes was added to those of heavy teaching assignments and research itself.33 Library resources at the colleges, moreover, were frequently inadequate, and graduate programs limited in scope – thus, as Barnes realized, for her to go to Mount Holyoke would mean that ‘I could not hope to build up a group of disciples around me as scholars in the university can do.’ There was also the reality, which must have weighed in her deliberations, that the longer a female scholar spent at a women’s college, the more remote her chances of obtaining a position elsewhere.34

40 Viola Florence Barnes: A Historian’s Biography

There was, of course, something to be said on the other side. For some women, employment at a women’s college was the alternative to having no academic employment at all.35 However, this did not apply to Barnes, with her position still open in Nebraska. It was true also that women’s colleges offered an environment where, at its best, women academics would form a dynamic and supportive intellectual community, with the additional sense of purpose that came from training young women for their evolving social roles. Viola Barnes, on the basis of her experience of the student culture at the University of Nebraska, was well aware of the advantages of separate women’s organizations.36 Yet it is doubtful whether this was a decisive factor as Barnes considered her options. In truth, pressure was being exerted on her to remain in New England. A 1943 study of the careers of women PhDs in history noted, without enthusiasm, that Harvard and Yale graduates were clustered in New England colleges. This indicated, William B. Hesseltine and Louis Kaplan commented, ‘a deplorable tendency toward regional inbreeding.’37 Deplorable or not, there was a network of mentor-protégée relationships that, on the whole, worked to the benefit of those who were content to submit to its unwritten rules of patronage and deference. As Barnes recalled Andrews’s exact words, he said to her, ‘I think you have a flair for research and though it is a great loss in many ways [when compared to the University of Nebraska], prestige and everything else, I want you very much to take that post because I think you’ve got a career as a scholar ahead of you and this is the perfect job for it.’38 In effect, she was being invited to remain in the charmed circle of Andrews’s disciples and within the imperial orbit of Yale, or forsake both for the perceived isolation of Nebraska. Not altogether surprisingly, she decided to go to Mount Holyoke. She defended her thesis in the spring, returned to Nebraska for the summer, and moved to South Hadley for the fall term.39 ‘And here,’ she recorded much later in an autobiographical fragment, ‘in this beautiful spot I have been ever since.’ To a friend, however, she confided – also late in life – that she regarded it as the worst mistake she had ever made.40 Mount Holyoke in 1919 was a product of the changes initiated by Mary Woolley almost two decades before. Not a graduate of the college, Woolley – a feminist and a pacifist – sought to make of it a selfconsciously separatist women’s institution yielding nothing in academic quality to those that educated men. In setting out to accelerate the college’s transition from its origins as the seminary established by Mary Lyon in 1837 into a scholarly institution of the twentieth century, she

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Yale graduation (Photograph Collection of Viola Barnes, Class of 1919, Yale University [RU 660]. Manuscripts and Archives, Yale University)

41

42 Viola Florence Barnes: A Historian’s Biography

had the advantage of a series of retirements among the older teachers soon after her arrival. She set out to recruit replacements with PhD degrees, Bryn Mawr graduates conspicuous among them. At the same time, Woolley encouraged existing faculty members who lacked graduate degrees to take a leave of absence and go back to school. Sometimes, it was said, the encouragement included making further employment conditional on the acquisition of the appropriate degree. Even when Barnes arrived, some of the older members spoke of the early part of Woolley’s presidency as ‘the heart-break days.’41 The issue remained a sensitive one, even as the college grew to accommodate a student population of some eight hundred and a faculty numbering more than one hundred.42 Mount Holyoke shared certain key characteristics with other women’s colleges, notably Wellesley, in having a faculty community led by intellectually powerful and institutionally committed women. As at Wellesley, leadership could easily verge on intimidation of younger members – especially at the hands of permanent department heads who were adept at playing, in the words of Patricia Palmieri, ‘the game of loving despotism.’43 At Mount Holyoke, however, there was a further dynamic at work. Institutional change had been recent, rapid, and deliberate. Those who had been recruited during the first decade of the century, particularly the ‘Bryn Mawrters,’ were self-conscious about the transformation they had wrought. They had formed the leading edge of Woolley’s drive for renewal, and they retained a pride and a coherence that was not necessarily welcoming to newcomers. Two of the most impressive appointments of Woolley’s early years had been the historians Nellie Neilson in 1902 and Bertha Putnam in 1908. Both were medievalists influenced by Andrews at Bryn Mawr. Neilson, forty-six years old in 1919, had published her dissertation twenty years before as a pioneering study of agriculture on a large English estate. It had been completed under Andrews’s supervision. Prior to joining the faculty at Mount Holyoke, she had spent time at both Oxford and Cambridge. Other publications followed, but by the early 1920s she was moving into an especially productive period during which two major books formed the basis for an influential interpretive paper that she presented at the meetings of the American Historical Association in 1928, asserting that historians had tended to underestimate the diversity of medieval manorial organizations. When Barnes arrived at Mount Holyoke, Neilson was a mature and senior scholar just entering on her prime.44 Putnam, although slightly older than Neilson and a contemporary during undergraduate years at Bryn Mawr, had taken a longer route

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to Mount Holyoke. Teaching in private schools for several years, she had then taken her doctorate at Columbia in 1908. Specializing in local governance and legal history in medieval England, she published her dissertation immediately and then wrote a series of books and articles focusing on the role of justices of the peace. For Putnam too the 1920s were productive years, as her research and publications built towards the crowning achievement of her prize-winning Proceedings Before the Justices of the Peace in the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries, published in 1938.45 For Viola Barnes, these were powerful and senior colleagues. The department also included another Bryn Mawr graduate, Ellen Ellis, although (in what was, in effect, a composite department) she was a political scientist specializing in international relations rather than a historian.46 The likes of Neilson and Putnam were notable for their social origins as well as for their scholarship. According to two of their most distinguished graduates in medieval history, Margaret Hastings and Elisabeth Kimball, both came from ‘comfortably affluent’ backgrounds. Neilson’s father, a mining engineer, was the founder of Standard Steel in Philadelphia. The Putnam family business was the well-known publishing firm started by Bertha’s grandfather.47 As a younger Mount Holyoke faculty member would later put it, these were ‘women of class.’48 They certainly outranked, in that regard, the daughter of a miller and weekly newspaper editor from small-town Nebraska. More immediately, their respective relationships with Andrews were quite different from that of Barnes. In 1895, when Andrews was struggling to assemble enough money to get married, Putnam had come to the rescue by inducing her father to attend some of the young scholar’s lectures and then offer him an attractive contract for a survey text in European history. Neilson, meanwhile, had known Andrews’s future wife while they were undergraduates at Bryn Mawr. Their friendship had continued over the years, and when Neilson wrote to Charles and Evangeline Andrews it was to ‘Charlie’ and ‘Van,’ as opposed to Barnes’s respectful but constrained ‘Mr Andrews.’49 In the cultural context of women’s college faculties, Barnes lacked the consciously cultivated and solidly professional middleclass family background that was common to many older colleagues.50 Beyond that, both Neilson and Putnam had an aristocratic air that came directly from the proceeds of late-nineteenth-century industrial capitalism. As a westerner too, Barnes no doubt shared in the earlier experience of the pioneering woman historian Lucy Maynard Salmon, a graduate of the University of Michigan who had discovered while on a research fel-

44 Viola Florence Barnes: A Historian’s Biography

Nellie Neilson (Mount Holyoke College Archives and Special Collections)

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Bertha Putnam (Mount Holyoke College Archives and Special Collections)

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46 Viola Florence Barnes: A Historian’s Biography

lowship at Bryn Mawr that there the western universities were seen as ‘hardly worth considering.’51 United States history was also a field that did not enjoy quite as immaculate a pedigree as did English medieval studies. No matter. When Barnes arrived, she was surprised to learn that her teaching assignment included two sections of a medieval course, one course in modern European history, and ‘one horrible little course in American institutional and constitutional history.’ According to her later recollection, she was ‘told right away that American history was not a suitable subject for college.’52 In reality, some American history had been taught at Mount Holyoke at least since the 1890s. It had assumed a minor role in the curriculum, however, and library resources were pitifully small. After two years, Barnes did win the consent of Neilson – who occupied a powerful position in these matters, as permanent department head since 1905 – to introduce a general introductory course in American history. But she was left to her own devices in attempting to scramble together library resources to cope with substantial enrolments. Altogether, it seemed to Barnes that both she and her area of expertise faced ‘a stone wall of hostility in that department.’53 There were other areas of life at Mount Holyoke that were more satisfactory. Although later in her Mount Holyoke career Barnes would become a critic of Mary Woolley, her first impression of the president was favourable. Woolley, she believed, ‘always understood the younger faculty.’54 The younger faculty, in turn, had a firm basis for understanding one another. Identified neither with the older Bryn Mawr contingent, nor with the rival group of graduates of the college itself who took pride in being known as ‘daughters of Mount Holyoke,’ Barnes and others playfully named themselves ‘the daughters of the concubines’ and set about breaking free of the rituals of tea-drinking that punctuated the day for the established faculty members. Not that it was wise to avoid tea altogether. The faculty afternoon tea club, according to Barnes, was ‘the great common center for all types of projects, political as well as social.’ But other diversions for the junior faculty included weekend groups at a farmhouse outside a neighbouring town, outings to the movie theatre in nearby Northampton, and walks in the fields and orchards that surrounded Mount Holyoke itself. In winter there were snowshoeing and cross-country skiing parties. ‘That I look back on as one of the happiest times of my whole life,’ Barnes commented: ‘the outdoor life that the younger faculty had particularly in winter.’55 Her relations with the students also prospered. Like many younger

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faculty members, she lived in a student residence and presided over a table at the evening meal. Her first evening was awkward, when she was asked to ‘open the dining room’ and failed to realize that this meant saying grace. Not only did this contrast with what she remembered from her own student days – ‘at the frat house, of course, we’d always eaten unblessed food’ – but the absence of any religious references from Barnes’s letters or recollections suggests that after leaving Lincoln the former Sunday school teacher had severed her links with Methodism or any other form of organized religion.56 She had taken up smoking, although it is not clear whether she had yet begun to drink the scotch whisky and bourbon that in later years became for her an important recreation. Prohibition notwithstanding, alcoholic drinks were not difficult to come by even at a women’s college, and it may be that the weekend ‘bats’ she shared with other junior faculty members were fuelled by more than coffee.57 At a time when students were questioning traditional disciplinary limits, Barnes’s irreverence was a strong recommendation. Because Woolley had publicly described tobacco as ‘a vile weed,’ Barnes as a smoker earned from the students the nickname ‘Viol.’ As such, she was instrumental in mediating a sharp dispute between students and administration over smoking regulations. The compromise of continuing to ban smoking either in the residences or in any public place, but otherwise leaving the matter to the conscience of the individual student, earned Barnes blame from some of her older faculty colleagues but praise from students – and, incidentally, from Woolley, who liked the idea of appealing to the better nature of the latest generation of Mount Holyoke daughters.58 While Barnes’s early career at Mount Holyoke thus brought both frustrations and rewards, there were other troubles less directly connected with the college that had lasting results. In October 1920 she found a lump on her right breast. Crediting her upbringing as a doctor’s daughter for her prudence, Barnes had it examined the next day. The college doctor was reassuring. Her guess was that the lump was a cyst not a tumour. But she moved quickly to arrange for its surgical removal. Within four days, Barnes underwent surgery at the hospital in Springfield. As the college doctor later told her, only microscopic examination during the operation itself revealed the presence of cancerous cells. In accordance with prevailing medical practice, the surgeon immediately removed the breast. The first Viola Barnes knew of it was when a wellmeaning nurse offered encouragement that she might still be able to marry if she could just find the right man.59

48 Viola Florence Barnes: A Historian’s Biography

Viola faced, in reality, difficulties more pressing than any contemplation of marriage. Although she almost never referred in later years to her mastectomy or to its psychological or emotional costs, it is unlikely that they were anything but long-lasting. In the shorter term, her recovery was arduous. For the rest of the academic year, she struggled with what she described later as being ‘nervous’ and ‘almost breaking.’ Her father described it at the time as ‘abnormal depression.’60 Financial problems did not help. Barnes had arrived from Yale heavily in debt. After a tiring first year at Mount Holyoke, she had taken a job at a tutoring camp in Maine for the summer. Debts remained, however, and the operation inevitably added to them. When told she must remain in the hospital for a month, Barnes refused. Eventually, after ten days, the ‘gruff old college doctor’ insisted that she take up temporary residence in the college infirmary, where she was able to complete the immediate recovery process at minimal cost.61 Moving back to the student dormitory, she slept poorly and was troubled by noise in the hallways. When friends urged her to move elsewhere, she responded that she could not afford it. Offers of financial assistance from her father and her brother Frank inadvertently brought further stress rather than relief. She rejected them angrily. By December, relations with her family were beginning to settle down again. She also apparently became closer to Nellie Neilson, whose support she praised in letters to family members. But she persisted in staying in the residence until the following academic year, when she moved to the nearby Faculty House. There she lived for the next fourteen years, at first sharing an apartment with another of the younger members. It was quiet and convenient, but the rent absorbed any spare cash she might have had. The cost of being a cancer survivor was not measured primarily in material terms, but the illness and its continuing toll had been made all the harder to bear by her financial straits.62 A further source of stress was approaching from a different direction. While at Yale, Viola Barnes had become concerned about the possible appropriation of her research findings by more senior scholars. Her anxiety centred first on Andrews. During her final year at Yale, her brother Don had been alarmed at her distress and disillusionment. ‘I am sorry,’ he quickly wrote back, ‘that you are temperamentally balanced so that you have extremes of exuberance and black despair.’ While the specifics of her complaint were not explained in Don’s letter, and Viola’s does not survive, its general outlines were clear enough in the advice he offered: I think it is perfectly all right for you to come to an understanding with Andrews, but I would avoid an hysterical or theatrical break. I would tell

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him coolly or coldly that you object to having the cream skimmed off your thesis. However, I am certain that you will do nothing so rash as to throw up the sponge and not attempt to get your Ph.D. ... The best thing to do is to either come to an understanding with Andrews, or conceal as much as possible until you get your degree and then sever relations with him. Still there is too much joy to be gained from the intellectual life to allow the shattering of one ideal to ruin things.63

Don’s almost-explicit suggestion that Viola suffered from what would later become known as bi-polar disorder may have had some merit. That it may have been associated with what (again, later) would be defined as a paranoid personality disorder, would become increasingly plausible as her suspicions of betrayal came to extend to more and more colleagues, acquaintances, friends, and family members over the years. Her fears of plagiarism in the early 1920s, however, can be better explained as contributing causes of any later disorder rather than as early products of it. Barnes’s objections to Andrews undoubtedly owed something to the characteristic ambiguities of the relationship between supervisor and doctoral student. Although it was based by definition on the shared goal of launching the younger student’s independent scholarly career, the relationship also had strong elements of paternalism. And, while this was true regardless of the gender of the student, it may have been all the greater in view of Andrews’s unusual number of women advisees. From paternalism, it could be a short step to assuming an entitlement to make direct use of the research of graduate students, with or without their knowledge. Even with their knowledge, it was questionable whether consent could ever be freely given by a graduate student whose future career might depend crucially on the supervisor’s recommendation. The episode that may well have prompted Viola Barnes’s letter to her brother in 1919 had to do with an incident in a seminar led by Andrews. When he contested a statement of hers regarding the use of quit-rents as devices for land tenure in colonial Massachusetts – he did not believe her assertion that quit-rents had existed there – Barnes decided to come to the next week’s seminar well armed with references from her thesis research to support her argument. She later narrated what followed: I thought these notes would prove without a doubt the point I had made. Unfortunately for me, they did! Andrews looked wildly excited, dismissed the class, asked me to remain, and then rapidly began to copy off my notes,

50 Viola Florence Barnes: A Historian’s Biography saying, Miss Barnes, you have struck a gold mine! It is a pity to take it from you, but I can’t afford to let any one else in that field before me, for I should have found it earlier.64

Barnes’s account is corroborated by certain characteristics of Andrews’s ‘Introduction’ to Beverley Waugh Bond’s The Quit-Rent System in the American Colonies, published by Yale University Press later in 1919. She attributed his excitement in part to his being in the final stages of preparing these remarks, and still having time to make hasty modifications to some of his statements to allow for the existence of quit-rents in New England. The introduction did indeed incorporate a curiously equivocal comment that quit-rents ‘had a place, even in ... [the] self-governing Puritan colonies,’ and a lengthy note tacked on at the end of the piece (outside of the normal sequence of footnotes) giving examples.65 Andrews clearly saw nothing wrong in his actions. But for Viola Barnes, the episode brought a corrosive element of caution and mistrust into a relationship she had once idealized and still necessarily valued. Barnes was also critical of Andrews for indirectly permitting her research to be poached by yet another author. This episode came to a head following the completion of her dissertation, and for her was a source of continuing anxiety and exasperation throughout the early 1920s. In 1921, James Truslow Adams published The Founding of New England, the first of two volumes on colonial New England.66 Barnes believed that the chapter on the Dominion of New England, entitled ‘An Experiment in Administration,’ was substantially based on her dissertation. According to her account, she went to Yale in the spring of 1920 to take out the library copy of the dissertation (she had been unable to afford to have a copy made for herself) and start revising it for publication. She was told it was unavailable, as Adams had it out, and that the library somehow had the impression that he was its author. A few days after she had identified herself as the author, she received the dissertation – but too late, she believed, to avoid Adams’s pre-emption of her interpretation of the Dominion as an important and complex embodiment of British imperial policy rather than (as more conventional accounts had it) a crude form of British tyranny. Barnes also pointed out that Adams lacked any training as a historian, and questioned whether an author whose only university studies had been years before in psychology could have arrived at the interpretive conclusions set out in his book. She was galled when the American Historical Review published a review of the book by Samuel Eliot Morison that drew attention in particular to the

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novelty of the title of the offending chapter, as opposed to the designation of the period by the earlier historian John Fiske as ‘the Tyranny of [Governor Sir Edmund] Andros.’67 To add insult to injury, when Barnes’s dissertation itself was published in 1923, Adams was asked to review it for American Historical Review. Although guardedly positive in its general tone, the review asserted that Barnes’s interpretation of Andros ‘does not differ materially from that of the more recent writers on this period,’ and rubbed the point in a paragraph later with the judgment that ‘in the main, the book does not alter the general view now held of the Andros régime.’ Adams also criticized Barnes for not introducing new source materials.68 What reason might there be for regarding Barnes’s belief that her work had been appropriated as anything more than the imaginings of a troubled and disappointed individual? The evidence suggests that, in reality, cause and effect worked in the opposite direction: that Barnes’s apprehensions were justifiable and tended to undermine her emotional health at a time when it was already vulnerable following her cancer surgery. Barnes believed, probably rightly, that it was Andrews who had directed Adams to her thesis. Andrews certainly saw no evidence of moral turpitude, as he showed in agreeing to look over Adams’s book in proof or in carrying on a lengthy correspondence with him throughout the early 1920s.69 There was no suggestion that Adams had lifted passages word-for-word from Barnes, but rather that he had adopted her overall interpretation without acknowledgment. Barnes herself was inclined to believe later in life that Adams had acted not with a deliberate intention of plagiarizing but ‘through ignorance or arrogance or both.’ Nevertheless, Andrews did come to believe that a flaw in process had been involved, and he successfully urged the Yale authorities to change the library regulations so that an unpublished thesis could be seen only with the author’s consent.70 Other respected scholars, closer to Barnes’s own age, took a more serious view. Howard Beale of the University of Wisconsin heard of the matter independently on several occasions from ‘Merle [Curti, also from Madison] and others.’71 Leonard Labaree of Yale also had no doubt that she had a valid complaint, and told her so: ‘In earlier years the dissertations submitted at Yale were regularly filed in the Library without altogether proper safeguards ... But experiences such as yours led to the introduction of additional rules in this respect – rules in the administration of which I was directly concerned during the thirteen years when I was editor of the Yale Historical Series.’72 Even in the pages of the Amer-

52 Viola Florence Barnes: A Historian’s Biography

ican Historical Review there was a suggestion that Adams’s book had owed much to other historians. Although giving no hint of impropriety, Evarts Greene of Columbia University gave Adams’s second volume a favourable review but based it partly on a contrast with the first volume – which, Greene wrote, had been ‘especially in the field of imperial relations, ... a popularization’ of the work of others such as Osgood, Beer, and Andrews.73 Perhaps feeling chastened, Adams in 1925 gave Barnes’s book a more wholeheartedly positive review in The New Republic.74 A year later, after she had sent him a copy of an article she had recently published, his note of thanks was gracious. ‘I had already used your Dominion of New England with much interest and profit,’ he informed her. Barnes suggested in a return note that, if he used her work in the future, he might consider giving her an acknowledgment. She received no reply.75 This was an episode that remained vivid for Viola Barnes throughout her life. ‘I was heart-broken at first,’ she later confided to a colleague.76 Approving reviews of her own work helped, but at the time she had no way of knowing that her Dominion of New England would be read and cited by serious scholars long after Adams’s name had vanished from the historiographical map. Along with her partial disillusionment with Andrews, all of this made her professional world a more shadowy and treacherous place. Nor in the mid-1920s was Mount Holyoke itself much more secure. When Barnes published Dominion of New England in 1923, she included an acknowledgment to Nellie Neilson for ‘most helpful assistance in preparing the manuscript for publication.’77 In reality, however, friction between them had already begun again. Sometimes it was as specific an issue as Barnes’s request during the summer of 1921 for a leave of absence the following year, which was sharply turned down by Neilson on the ground – no doubt valid enough – that it would be difficult to find a replacement.78 At other times, it would be the more general issue of Barnes’s annoyance with the Bryn Mawr group, of whom Neilson was a leading member. Part of her found them intimidating. At the faculty meetings, there was an informal but rigid order of precedence in seating, with the senior Bryn Mawr contingent at the front of the room and the likes of Barnes at the back. If Neilson, Putnam, and Ellis had a strong view on an issue, she was expected to join them in the voting. ‘If a vote was put,’ she recalled, ‘and the department all had their hands up and I didn’t, I would be nudged by ... somebody who said, “Put your hand up, for God’s sake!” And I would put my hand up for God’s sake or more for my own sake, I was scared.’79 Scared perhaps,

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but she was also irritated by the group’s hypocrisy. She noted the contradiction between their reverence for the pioneering Bryn Mawr president M. Carey Thomas for ‘putting women’s education on the map,’ and the capricious and sometimes ruthless manner in which they treated younger women colleagues at their own institution.80 And Viola Barnes was never good at hiding her feelings. There was also a more personal dimension, at least as Barnes told it. During their period of friendship in and about 1920, Neilson would give Barnes lessons in skiing and snowshoeing. Increasingly, Barnes found her becoming possessive. Neilson would object to Barnes’s spending time with younger friends, and would insist on being consulted when Barnes went shopping for clothes or other personal items. Ellen Ellis, meanwhile, was offended by the amount of time Barnes spent with Neilson.81 For Viola Barnes to disentangle all of this while recovering her physical and emotional health was no easy task. Nor did her resentment of the overbearing collectivity of the ‘Bryn Mawrters’ – including both Neilson and Ellis – make it any simpler. By the summer of 1924, relations with Neilson were wearing thin. Barnes wrote to her to ask about having additional work space and a raise in pay, apparently also indicating that she might look for a position elsewhere if the requests were not granted. Neilson’s reply began, ‘Dear Vi,’ and ended, ‘Much love dear, Nell.’ In between, she made it clear that she saw no reason to consider Barnes’s requests, and that she would advise Woolley to release her immediately if that was her wish.82 This was obviously enough to persuade Barnes to stay for the 1924–5 year. She did enter into correspondence that autumn about a possible appointment at Vassar, with encouragement from Andrews. As it turned out, however, all that was available was an instructorship. Barnes offered in January 1925 to take a cut in rank from associate to assistant professor, but there the matter ended.83 This was the prelude to a more serious incident in 1927. Barnes had begun to receive a series of fellowships that enabled her at last to begin her own research at the Public Record Office and other British and continental archives. Her first overseas foray was to London and Paris during the summer of 1925. Then in early 1926 the American Association of University Women named her as the recipient of the 1926–7 Alice Freeman Palmer Memorial Fellowship, valued at $1200, for a full year of research in London.84 From London in the spring of 1927, Barnes wrote to Neilson to ask for additional library appropriations at Mount Holyoke for American history. Neilson, exasperated, replied by rebuking her lack of cooperation with department policy, hinting strongly that

Cross-country skiing with Nellie Neilson, early 1920s (Mount Holyoke College Archives and Special Collections)

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Barnes’s appointment at Mount Holyoke would not be renewed when it expired in two years’ time, and advising her to seek employment elsewhere. ‘I have talked this matter over with Miss Woolley,’ Neilson added, ‘and she agrees with me.’85 Barnes took this, in effect, as a letter of dismissal. Soon afterwards, she received word of a position at Wells College for which Notestein had strongly recommended her. Notestein, incidentally, had also been attempting unsuccessfully to persuade his colleagues at Cornell to recruit a woman for a vacant senior position in medieval history – the candidate he had in mind was Nellie Neilson. As for Barnes, he thought, the department head at Wells ‘will have to take you, for I do not know where she can find your equal elsewhere.’86 When an offer came from Wells of a position at Barnes’s existing rank of associate professor at a substantially increased salary, however, she turned it down. A full professorship, she informed Mary Woolley in a letter written the next day, might be more difficult to refuse.87 But no further offer materialized. In the meantime, however, Woolley denied that she had ever agreed with Neilson on Barnes’s non-renewal. Only if Barnes herself decided to leave Mount Holyoke, she wrote, would she be in favour of her release. The president’s secretary was sympathetic: ‘What a mess N.N. can make,’ she commented.88 With the Wells position out of consideration and Woolley’s viewpoint clarified, Barnes was now more focused and confident. Off to Cambridge for research at the University Library, she declined to return to London for a meeting with Neilson. When Barnes got back to Mount Holyoke, Woolley called her in to reaffirm her support. ‘She couldn’t have been more humane or more understanding,’ Barnes recalled.89 Her position more secure at Mount Holyoke than it had ever been, the episode was effectively over in that regard. However, the ill feeling it had created would be much longer lasting. An angry Neilson described her ‘rather unpleasant experiences with Viola Barnes’ in a letter to Andrews. Regretting Barnes’s refusal of the offer from Wells, she asked Andrews to recommend Barnes to anywhere else that might take her. ‘The trouble is,’ Neilson judged, ‘her utter inability to cooperate with other people; it makes her impossible in a department organized like ours.’90 Barnes, in turn, struck out mordantly, though privately, against her now-estranged department head. In a notebook dated 1928 she wrote a poem entitled ‘The Academic Courtesan.’ The opening lines – ‘White fluffy hair / Like the top of a dandelion / Gone to seed / Eyes of turquoise’ – left no doubt as to who was being satirized as the seducer and manipulator through ‘tokens of love,’ of everyone from

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‘mighty ministers / Of the academic state’ to ‘boyish maids.’91 Neither Neilson’s anger nor Barnes’s sense of betrayal would ever fade completely. Yet, as the 1920s went on, there were also rewards. Some were personal. Friendships in Faculty House made up for the unwritten rules of hierarchy that determined such matters as who sat at the best tables in the dining room.92 Outdoor recreation included horseback-riding, which Viola Barnes herself introduced to Mount Holyoke as an organized activity in 1920. Originally designed as a small club for faculty members only, and specifically as a way for Viola to ‘get out in the country ... [and] get my nerves under control’ following her surgery, within months the riding school was also open to students and had a membership of two hundred. She continued to run it until her departure for London in 1926; then it was taken over, four years later, by the new head of the department of physical education, Mildred Howard.93 It was one of the interests that eventually linked Viola and ‘Miff’ in a partnership that saw them setting up house together in the mid-1930s and living from then on in lifelong proximity. The greatest satisfactions during this period of Viola’s life, however, were professional. The completion of her dissertation was all the more gratifying because it brought praise from her father. ‘I read it,’ he told her, ‘and live right along with the people of that time.’94 Cass thought it should be published, and Charles McLean Andrews was of the same mind. Characteristically, Andrews went over the manuscript meticulously to recommend revisions and corrections. Equally characteristically, Viola could not resist correcting the corrections.95 The finished product, outside of James Truslow Adams’s strictures in American Historical Review, was warmly received. Dedicated to her brother Don, the book – as had the dissertation – offered an analysis of the Dominion of New England that was solidly based on an institutional foundation but also went beyond the institutional focus to deal with matters of governance, trade, and religion. Two chapters that were new in the book considered the overthrow of the Dominion by the revolution of 1689 and its confirmation through the Massachusetts charter of 1691. The Dominion, for Barnes, was an experiment that, while short-lived, had been in its day a piece of ‘constructive statesmanship’ worthy of comparison with the report of Lord Durham in 1839 on the British North American colonies.96 A laudatory notice in the English Historical Review by the senior Oxford-based imperial historian H.E. Egerton, although attributing the book to ‘Dr Julia Barnes,’ praised her tone of ‘complete detach-

The Emerging Scholar, 1916–1929

The emerging scholar (Mount Holyoke College Archives and Special Collections)

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58 Viola Florence Barnes: A Historian’s Biography

ment from patriotic or party prejudices.’97 Closer to home, Winfred Trexler Root wrote to congratulate her on ‘a fine piece of work.’ He said the same to Andrews, who cordially passed the comment along.98 Andrews’s earlier transgressions now receded into the background, as the originality of Barnes’s work became self-evident. Her Dominion of New England was innovative on two levels. As an institutional study, it was unrivalled (and would remain so) in its analysis of the operations of the Dominion and how they related to pre-existing structures in such areas as taxation, justice, and landholding. But the real historiographical import – the interpretive core of the book – lay deeper than this. Far from being an arbitrary English imposition, in Barnes’s view, the Dominion was well received by many New Englanders. Although resisted by the old Puritan elite, which objected to giving up its political and social power, it was favoured by numerous ‘moderates.’ This group would have been well placed to ensure the long-term continuation of the Dominion had it not been for two factors. First, the failure to provide for a representative assembly was a crucial mistake, recognized as such by both Governor Andros and the moderates. Second, at the time of the English revolution of 1688–9 the new king, William III, foolishly decided to concede to the Puritan faction by abolishing the Dominion, thereby missing the opportunity to reform it by adding an assembly and thus enhancing the stability of New England’s institutions.99 Thus, the book represented a carefully mounted assault on the notion of lateseventeenth-century New England as an essentially Puritan society. While couched in political terms, this argument also had deeper societal implications. The book rejected the dynamic that was and (despite Barnes) remained so crucial to United States historiography: the duality of imperial tyranny and freedom-loving colonists. For Barnes, there were different seventeenth-century understandings of freedom, and it was the duty of the historian to take account of all of them rather than just one that favoured a patriotic mythology. It remained true, of course – as Adams had pointed out in his review – that The Dominion of New England was based largely on printed sources. Its origins as a wartime dissertation had seen to that. Now, as a published scholar, Viola had better access to travel funds than before. London and Paris in the summer of 1925 were followed by two weeks of travel to Milan, Florence, Venice, and Rome.100 Back in South Hadley, she worked another publication. Her lengthy article on ‘Richard Wharton: A Seventeenth Century New England Colonial’ was published in 1925 in the Publications series of the Colonial Society of Massachusetts,

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and then republished in England as a booklet the following year.101 In terms of research, this was an offshoot from her dissertation. Historiographically, however, it represented for Barnes a further sharpening of her argument on the nature of New England politics and society. Richard Wharton, a non-Puritan and thus a non-freeman in Massachusetts before the Dominion, was presented as a substantial merchant and landowner who favoured reform in the Dominion but would have powerfully opposed its overthrow had he not died in the spring of 1689. Wharton, Barnes argued, was archetypal of leading New Englanders whom historians had willfully overlooked, ‘who saw New England, not as a place of refuge for a chosen people, but as the frontier of England, with the governmental principles of the mother country transplanted and modified to suit the conditions of the new world.’102 The Alice Freeman Palmer fellowship in 1926–7 gave Viola Barnes a full year overseas. For a time, she also had hopes that an endowment fund, which also bore the name of the University of Michigan graduate who had served from 1881 to 1892 as president of Wells College, might in a few years’ time take her to a chair at the University of Michigan. This she had from Claude Van Tyne, department head at Michigan. However, whether because of Van Tyne’s death soon after or because of the impact of the Great Depression on the endowment fund, nothing happened. Not until 1958 did Caroline Robbins of Bryn Mawr become the first holder of a visiting Alice Freeman Palmer appointment at the University of Michigan.103 London in 1926 and 1927, however, was rewarding. More than ever before, Barnes had the time to immerse herself in manuscript sources and plan out the continuation of her study of imperial–Massachusetts relations beyond 1689. She was unable entirely to escape British social tensions of the mid-1920s. Although the general strike was over by the time she arrived, the miners’ strike persisted and resulted in the heating of the Public Record Office’s Round Room only by a small and infrequently lighted stove – the only chair close to which was claimed by Bertha Putnam, on the ground that she alone of the American scholars had the chutzpah to ask for the fire to be kindled. The hardship was, of course, small compared to that endured by the miners, and in any case it was offset at least intellectually by Barnes’s invited weekly attendance at A.F. Pollard’s seminar at the University of London and the dinners that followed. She also belonged to a group of visiting scholars who met for tea breaks, and there cemented a lasting friendship with her Yale contemporary Marjorie Hope Nicolson of Smith College, who was in London on a Guggenheim Fellowship.104

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The following summer again allowed time for travel. Germany and France gave welcome relief from British food – ‘How an Englishman can eat a soggy boiled potato without salt, sauce or butter, every day of his life without getting the blues, I don’t see’ – but no coffee to equal what she remembered from the church suppers her mother still lovingly described in her letters. Visiting cathedrals was a theme of Viola’s continental journeys, and in Britain too, as she wrote home to her parents. By this time, they had moved from Albion to Madison, county seat of the adjoining Madison County, and Cass had bought the local Star-Mail. With or without her advance knowledge, he printed her travel letters in the newspaper each week.105 One element of her travels that did not make the newspaper was her meeting with a young male architect, with whom she shared a Yale background and an interest in cathedrals. Just turning forty-two years old, Viola Barnes during the 1920s had lived primarily in the company of women. It seemed to be by choice as much as by necessity. But this friendship, as short as it was decorous, lingered in her memory for many years. ‘We did not room together, nor sleep together as student travellers seem to today,’ she reminisced to her brother Don in 1968, ‘but there were times when luggage had to be carried, that we travelled with one suitcase.’106 Returning to Mount Holyoke in the fall, Barnes resumed the serious business of teaching and writing. In the classroom, her enrolments were healthy as she experimented with the use of films. These early, silent documentaries on American history had to be shown at first in the movie theatre in South Hadley, until the college finally acquired a projector. Barnes also introduced ‘the forum-discussion method’ in all but general survey courses, attributing the effectiveness of her emphasis on class interaction rather than lectures to her adaptation of techniques she had learned in Yale seminars.107 Her reputation as a teacher reached Smith College, in nearby Northampton, and during the 1927–8 year she gave a series of guest lectures in a historiography course there. ‘There was such enthusiasm ... from the students,’ wrote the department head at Smith, the European historian Sidney Fay, that she was invited again – to equal success – the following year.108 As far as writing went, Barnes spent the fall of 1927 on two chapters for the Harvard-based Commonwealth History of Massachusetts, one on the Dominion and the revolution of 1688–9, the other on Massachusetts in the pre-revolutionary era.109 Then she turned to writing two linked articles on Sir William Phips, first royal governor of Massachusetts under the 1691 charter, which appeared in 1928 in the inaugural volume of the New England

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Quarterly. Here for the first time Barnes incorporated into her work substantial portions of the research in manuscript sources she had carried out in London.110 Andrews for one was pleased that she was supporting the new journal, established at Harvard under the editorship of Samuel Eliot Morison and others, by writing for it. He liked her work on Phips, although pronouncing it ‘not as original a contribution as was your paper on Wharton.’111 His judgment was reasonable enough. Barnes was the first professional historian to write about Phips, and rightly chastised earlier biographers for myth-making and romanticization. She herself, however, clearly had a liking for the unorthodox Phips – more so than for the relatively bloodless Wharton. Thus, her Phips emerged vividly in her portrayal as an ‘essentially modern adventurer,’ but her treatment of Wharton had greater analytical power.112 Even so, the articles on Phips further entrenched her reputation as an authority on New England’s passage from the Dominion to the charter of 1691. They also formed part of a projected series of biographical articles on key political figures in Massachusetts at this time, eventually to be gathered together into a book. Yet Barnes became increasingly involved in research on the revolutionary era, and the series stopped with Wharton and Phips.113 To Andrews, acknowledging his comments on the Phips piece, she confided in late 1928 that ‘my book on the revolution is progressing rapidly, and is to me the most interesting thing I have ever worked on.’ After spending another summer in London in 1929, with a grant from the Council of Learned Societies, she again wrote to Andrews that ‘the book is to me a thrilling thing ... the most so of anything I have done, and I am most keen to finish it up and get it out.’114 Accordingly, with his encouragement, she decided to apply for fellowships for the 1930–1 year. Her most ambitious target was a Guggenheim Fellowship. Her brother Don, now at the University of Oregon, had had one in 1928–9, as he worked towards the publication of his first book in 1930, a history of the English Corn Laws.115 That Don, seven years her junior and lacking a publication record comparable to her own, should have preceded her to this distinction was a straw in the wind that foretold the later emergence of professional rivalry between them. Still, fellowships as prestigious as this one, Marjorie Nicolson notwithstanding, were notoriously difficult for women scholars to win.116 As she submitted her application in November 1929, Viola Barnes certainly had a powerful group of referees, seven male (Andrews, Verner Crane of Brown University, Morison, Notestein, Root, Arthur M. Schlesinger of Harvard, and Van Tyne) and

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two female (Nicolson, now dean at Smith College, and Louise Pound).117 How persuasive they would be remained to be seen. The thirteen years since Viola Barnes had left Nebraska had tested both her will and her health. Even in the spring of 1929, she had again been ill – though with what it is not clear.118 Her physical health had caused her concern especially in 1920. Her emotional health had had to contend with both professional and personal upheavals, and with the volatile mixture of both that she found in the charged climate of Mount Holyoke. By 1929 she was no longer the neophyte who had struggled to cope with the pressures imposed by older and more socially secure colleagues. To Nellie Neilson, she had eventually given as good as she had received – better, in fact, if Neilson were to be believed. Also by 1929, her professional future was promising. Her differences with Andrews had been set aside, and any competitors in her immediate field were now floundering in her wake. Although she would never free herself from tinges of regret for paths not taken, Barnes’s research was now an absorbing interest and a life work.

CH APTE R 3

‘A very busy professional woman’: Recognition, 1929–1939

In 1938, Viola Barnes wrote to a niece to offer advice on fields open to young women beginning their careers. She was herself, she remarked, ‘a very busy professional woman.’1 In family matters, the 1930s had not been kind either to Viola or to her brothers. The deaths in quick succession of their parents and their sister Ruby brought not only grief but also damaging family disputes over the handling of the estates. For Viola too, her brother Don’s marriage had begun a gradual change in a relationship that remained important to both, but was conducted at a distance and showed the first signs of a developing though littleacknowledged rivalry. At Mount Holyoke, even though turning fifty years old in 1935 as a mature and published scholar, Barnes was still a junior colleague of Nellie Neilson and Bertha Putnam. Where Neilson was concerned, and more occasionally Putnam, tensions continued. And insofar as they involved Barnes’s efforts to gain promotion, they were intensified by the more general pressures on college finances that came with the Great Depression. Through all of this, she was sustained in part by her close friendship with Mildred Howard, with whom she shared a house from 1935 onwards. Her professional life, however, was also a crucial source of strength. In the early 1930s, she continued to publish regularly. Recognition took various forms, ranging from overseas fellowships to responsibilities within the American Historical Association. Her teaching was praised, and the women historians of the recently founded Berkshire Historical Conference elected her as their president for five successive years. Her health faltered at times, and some – though not all – of those she encountered personally or professionally found her increasingly prickly and obstinate. It was as a professional woman, and as Mildred Howard’s friend and partner,

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that she was best able to transcend both her own exasperations and those she evoked in others. In late 1929, Viola Barnes worked carefully to prepare the groundwork for a series of fellowship applications that, if at least one of them were successful, would enable her to spend time in London the following year. Aware of the difficulties that usually confronted women applicants for the most prestigious awards, she lined up impressive recommendations. As she put it to Claude Van Tyne of the University of Michigan, ‘[I]t would be of tremendous advantage to me to have the support of the really important people in my field.’ To Charles McLean Andrews, she confided: ‘I did not want to leave any stone unturned to get funds for next year.’2 The Guggenheim Fellowship would be the ideal. But she also applied for three others. In the event, she was awarded all of them and accepted the Guggenheim. She could be excused the pride, and perhaps even the trace of archness, with which she approached President Mary Woolley the next year about a promotion by asking, ‘Did Miss Neilson tell you that I could have had any one of the four big fellowships last year, Guggenheim, Sterling, Social Science, Council of Learned Societies?’3 Barnes’s Guggenheim award was announced in March 1930.4 A letter from Louise Pound reached her soon after. ‘Lincoln is quite proud of you,’ Pound assured her. ‘You have gone pretty far since you lived at 1701 L Street and were drawn into the fraternity and the family.’ As a member of the Guggenheim Foundation’s advisory council, Pound had been privy to the deliberations on Barnes’s file. Strong letters from Marjorie Hope Nicolson and Samuel Eliot Morison, in Pound’s view, had turned the competition in Barnes’s favour.5 Now, Viola Barnes prepared to return to London. The year-long fellowship would pay her $2500. With Woolley agreeing to a sabbatical leave at half salary, the additional $1450 allowed her a comfortable year financially.6 The Round Room of the Public Record Office was not so comfortable physically on cold winter days, and this time there was no Bertha Putnam to call for the fire to be lit. Barnes took coffee breaks in the warmth of a nearby café, and there encountered one of the irritations all too familiar to a lone travelling woman. Wondering why ‘friendly’ men would often sit down at her table when empty ones were available, she was eventually informed by the cashier that ‘this is a Rendezvous House and women who come here do it to be joined.’ She solved the problem by arranging for men henceforth to be directed away from her table. More genuine companionship she found by again attending A.F. Pollard’s University of London seminar and the weekly dinners afterwards.7

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Viola Barnes, 1929 (Mount Holyoke College Archives and Special Collections)

66 Viola Florence Barnes: A Historian’s Biography

Barnes’s stay in London in 1930–1 was significant primarily because of advances in her research. During the summer of 1929, her work at the Public Record Office and the British Museum had dealt with the general area of ‘England’s Colonial Policy after 1763,’ researching the period up until the summer of 1775.8 Two years later, following her Guggenheim year, the project had taken a new and more boldly defined shape. Now entitled ‘The Disaster of British Expansion, 1760–1778,’ Barnes’s study had broken decisively with conventional interpretations of the era of the American Revolution. By redefining the chronological scope not just to include the period from the first Treaty of Paris to the outbreak of armed conflict in 1775, but instead to encompass all from the surrender of Canada to the entry of France into the Revolutionary War, she placed her analysis in an imperial as well as a colonial framework. The origins of the revolutionary movement could be seen as symptomatic of the larger problems of an empire in which expansion too far and too fast had taken on a life of its own. Thus, neither 1775 nor 1776 marked any real culmination of this crucial phase in imperial history. Only when rebellion gave way to international warfare in 1778, and so brought the expansionist era to an end, was full circle reached and the real imperial significance of the conquest of Canada revealed. And only if one examined the role of British policies in the light of the experience of the nonrebelling colonies – as well as the minority consisting of those thirteen in which civil conflict had gone against the Loyalists – could the complexities of empire be understood. To the Guggenheim Foundation, Barnes summarized her line of approach succinctly: While decidedly not pro-British in approach, the book aims to interpret the state of mind of George III and his ministers, and of leading men in those colonies which remained loyal as well as the motives and purposes of the revolutionary leaders, tracing this movement only in so far as it affected the Mother Country’s general commercial and colonial policy. Also, the importance of international and British party factors, and of rising sectional economic rivalries in the colonies is recognized. In these respects I believe I have much to offer that is new, and which makes my final interpretation of the loss of the colonies different from that which is now commonly accepted.9

Barnes’s approach had some affinities with the work of other historians who were exploring Loyalism and the non-rebelling colonies. Van Tyne had long since published his groundbreaking study of the Loyalists

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as ‘conservative and respectable Americans’ who suffered in a losing cause in a ‘fratricidal’ war.10 John Bartlet Brebner of Columbia had published in 1927 the first of his books that explored the relationship of Acadia / Nova Scotia with the more southerly colonies – New England’s Outpost: Acadia before the Conquest of Canada – and was at work on The Neutral Yankees of Nova Scotia, which would be published in 1937.11 In Van Tyne’s analysis, however, Loyalism was portrayed as a default position for conservatives – the ‘old faith’ – rather than as a response to a changing empire, while for Brebner Nova Scotia was a marginal colony that through its non-rebellion exchanged dependence on New England for dependence on Great Britain itself.12 Neither author integrated Loyalism and non-rebellion fully into an imperial framework. Lawrence Henry Gipson of Lehigh University, meanwhile, had not yet begun what would become a monumental and multi-volume history of The British Empire before the American Revolution. Although Gipson’s work would begin from a similar premise to that of Barnes – that the defeat of France began a chain of destructive consequences for the first British empire – it was for him the rise of an American civilization and nationalism that ultimately rendered the old imperial relationships untenable rather than, as for Barnes, an evolving complex of tensions within an overextended empire. While Gipson did not ignore the non-rebelling colonies, therefore, it was impossible to integrate them fully into his model. Barnes also found Gipson’s work discursive and lacking in interpretive rigour.13 Charles McLean Andrews himself might have been expected to cap his career by moving forward into the revolutionary era. Yet he never did so in a detailed study. He apparently intended his work to take this direction, and Barnes became convinced rightly or wrongly that he also intended to use her own research as a major source.14 Andrews, however, had always shied away from the revolutionary era, and from the difficult task of carrying his studies of the anatomy of imperial relationships into the era of the collapse of those same relationships. He was not a revisionist either by temperament or by inclination. As a pioneer of uncharted historical territories, he was a master. As a controversialist, he had a penchant – as A.S. Eisenstadt has observed – for ‘challenging enemies long since vanquished, fighting battles long since won.’15 The American Revolution was an active field in which intervention would mean abandoning this luxury. The reality was that a bold new interpretation of the revolutionary era in an imperial context was more likely to come from Barnes than from Andrews. First, of course, Barnes had to

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turn a proposal into a finished piece of work. As she went again to London during the summer of 1933, to carry her research through from 1776 to 1778, it was clear that time would be needed.16 How much time, and how much delay would later be caused by the outbreak of another world war, was not foreseeable for the moment. For Barnes, however, the early 1930s had been marked by further publications. In 1930, she took her only published excursion into women’s history by contributing to the New England Quarterly an edition of a series of letters, from the 1850s, by two Mount Holyoke students and a teacher. The piece had a Nebraska connection, as one of the themes of the letters was northern anti-slavery and New England reaction to the extension of slave territory by the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854. The teacher, Barnes concluded piquantly if also dismissively in her introduction to the letters, ultimately ‘followed her inclination and married, like many a Victorian woman who did not want a career badly enough to go against the traditional conception that woman’s sphere is the home.’ It obviously spoke poorly for this ‘school ma’am,’ the introduction implied rather than said, not only that she was a prissy New Englander with a ‘Puritanical fear of the Lord,’ but also that she ‘was destined by nature and interests [to be] a housewife rather than a bluestocking.’ Barnes’s publications were not usually characterized by selfrevelation, but this piece was the exception. Having struggled successfully herself to escape conventional constraints and advance her scholarship in spite of all obstacles, she was impatient with others who had the ability but not the gumption to do so.17 Then, in 1931, Barnes was one member of a five-person steering committee for the publication of a volume of essays as a tribute to Andrews by his former students. Barnes’s was the lead essay of the festschrift, examining ‘Land Tenure in English Colonial Charters of the Seventeenth Century,’ and this quickly became the best-known and most-cited of her articles. The Times Literary Supplement, for example, devoted twothirds of its review of the book to praising her essay.18 There was, however, an ironic subtext. Barnes had been preparing the piece for several years, but had held back from submitting it to a scholarly journal in case Andrews should be selected as a reader and might appropriate her arguments. ‘So I just hung on to it,’ she later recalled, ‘until the perfect occasion came. I was one of the editors for his festschrift, and submitted the article as my gift to him! So, since he must be surprised, he never saw it until it was published.’19 The festschrift essay, with its seventeenth-century orientation, was

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essentially a product of Viola Barnes’s research during the earlier phase of her career. The first fruit of her eighteenth-century work appeared in the New England Quarterly later in 1931. Entitled ‘Francis Legge, Royal Governor of Nova Scotia, 1773–1776,’ it had been presented at the American Historical Association’s annual meeting in 1930. Examining the circumstances in which Governor Legge succeeded in alienating leading Halifax merchants to the point that his own council warned in early 1776 that rebellion was imminent and sought the governor’s removal, Barnes analysed the reasons why all sides in the dispute preferred to resolve their differences within the empire rather than by joining the ferment further south.20 With the appearance of this essay, at a time when women historians characteristically had difficulty in penetrating the close-knit male networks that pervaded the profession and its most prestigious journals, Barnes had compiled an enviable record of publication.21 It now earned her such public badges of merit as election to the Royal Historical Society in London and to the nominating committee of the American Historical Association, both in 1934.22 More privately, Leonard Labaree of Yale wrote in 1932 to congratulate her on the Legge essay and commented: ‘I really do not see how you get time to turn out so many articles, etc., as you do.’23 Some four years later, her fellow Nebraskan Merle Curti of Smith College reported to her that a trade publisher wanted to know ‘how you stood as a historian.’ ‘I said,’ he went on, ‘on the top, practically.’24 Barnes was also in demand as a teacher both at Mount Holyoke and elsewhere. The college’s library resources in American history had been augmented by years of incremental acquisitions, supplemented from 1934 onwards by an annual grant of $1000 that Barnes had secured from a private foundation, and her student reading lists expanded to include her own works and those of other contemporary historians as well as a variety of printed primary sources.25 Continuing to make innovative use of film in the classroom, she developed too a primary source– based discussion method as the centrepiece of her teaching style in all but introductory survey courses. She also began to direct honours students. One of them, a graduate of 1932 who had worked on imperial approaches towards aboriginal inhabitants in the northern colonies, recalled when reviewing her thesis many years later that Barnes ‘was a fine scholar and a meticulous director of honors work. I am impressed with the primary and secondary sources that she must have pointed me toward!’26 Earlier in 1932, Barnes had been approached by Curti about spending a semester teaching at Smith while he was on leave. She

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accepted, her dean (to the professed surprise of Curti) agreed to release her, and by all accounts the semester was a success. According to Curti, Barnes ‘not only succeeded remarkably well in teaching – no one doubts her brilliance on that score – but ... also fitted beautifully into our group.’ Barnes herself reported in 1933 to her colleagues at the Berkshire Conference, who were considering initiating an exchange-professorship scheme for women historians, that her experience at Smith had left her convinced ‘of the great value of such an arrangement.’27 Viola Barnes also began in the mid-1930s to reach a wider audience. Lecturing in February 1936 on ‘Colonial Civilization in North America’ to a public forum in Springfield, she was introduced with the news that her book on imperial expansion was ready for publication.28 In radio addresses, however, she moved beyond purely historical analysis into current political issues. During the spring of 1935, she gave a series of four broadcasts for the World Wide Broadcasting Corporation in Boston, focusing on ‘Some Misunderstood Incidents in Early New England History.’ The mildness of the title was misleading. In reality, as well as deflating the mythologies surrounding the Mayflower Compact, property-sharing in Plymouth colony, the Dominion of New England, and the Boston Tea Party, Barnes used the broadcasts to attack Senator Huey Long and his Share-the-Wealth program. Long had made the mistake of claiming that the Plymouth colonists offered a precedent for his plan to provide a house and income for every American. For Barnes, any experimentation with property-sharing that may have been attempted at Plymouth had been an expedient reluctantly undertaken and one that was unlamented after its prompt failure. While the Dominion of New England offered, as Barnes portrayed it, a warning against riding roughshod over states’ rights, the Boston Tea Party and the Revolution in general provided the converse: until the adoption of the constitution in 1789, the ascendancy of states’ rights had been taken to an unworkable extreme. Here again, Long was targeted for his allegations that President Roosevelt was threatening the taxing powers of the states.29 Roosevelt, however, did not escape Barnes’s criticism in a further broadcast from Springfield in the fall of 1936. She had concluded by then that the New Deal in general, and the public-works initiatives of the Work Projects Administration in particular, were undermining basic American traditions of individualism and self-reliance that had endured from the Revolution onwards.30 There is no evidence that Barnes’s radio interventions had any perceptible influence either politically or in persuading radio audiences – as Barnes undoubtedly also hoped to do – that

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the study of colonial history was an essential precondition for informed public debate. Yet even the effort to do so was revealing. Although there is little surviving evidence of the development of her political persuasions, she seems to have continued the family Democratic tradition. At the same time, her faith in what she saw as the sturdy values of selfimprovement (her own and other people’s) made her suspicious of any political initiatives that smacked of socialism. Unreconstructed in the decades that followed, in later life she would join other, similarly inclined Democrats in voting for Richard Nixon.31 Closer to home, Viola Barnes’s record of research and teaching led in 1933 to her promotion to the rank of full professor.32 Yet tensions within her department persisted. Barnes’s pursuit of promotion had brought her into conflict again with Nellie Neilson, whom she blamed for an adverse decision in 1931.33 The poor state of her relations with Neilson was well known to those within academia whom she trusted: notably Louise Pound, Marjorie Nicolson, Merle Curti, and her brother Don. Curti had consulted with Nicolson, his dean, before approaching Barnes regarding the temporary position at Smith, part of the purpose of which would be ‘to make your administration, as well as your immediate boss [Neilson], see how much others think of you.’ He had addressed his formal request directly to the dean at Mount Holyoke, he added, because ‘Miss Neilson ... might never take it up with the administrative authorities, and they might never know a word of it.’34 From Louise Pound and from Don, however, Barnes received a slightly different form of support. Pound wrote in 1930 that she had no doubt that she would dislike Neilson if she should ever meet her. ‘But,’ she reminded Barnes gently, ‘you aren’t especially easy to get on with, you know.’ She recommended a renewed effort to ‘swallow a few principles’ and establish a better rapport.35 Don said much the same, but was not so delicate. ‘Would you not have a better chance at a professorship,’ he asked pointedly, ‘if she [Neilson] were allowed to gradually forget her position instead of having to frequently defend this position?’36 Neilson, in turn, remained suspicious of Barnes. When Barnes was awarded her Guggenheim Fellowship – even though Neilson had every reason to feel secure in her own scholarship – there was a hint of defensiveness in her comment to Andrews: ‘I think I am too old to apply for fellowships – it is different with young people like Viola who have health and youth and their way to make.’ Neilson was pleased, she said, at Barnes’s award. Yet, she continued, ‘I feel sure that she would be happier elsewhere than here, and that is the reasoned judgment of this

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department – we all concur. We should be happier too.’37 Fortunately for Barnes, she still had a good relationship with Woolley – even though the president’s life partner, Jeannette Marks, later divided the most memorable of the Mount Holyoke faculty members into the two categories of ‘brilliant’ (including Neilson) and ‘more independent’ – a list headed by Viola Barnes!38 As the 1930s went on, Barnes’s position became increasingly secure, but she thought no more warmly of Neilson. Approached in 1934 by Louise Phelps Kellogg of the University of Wisconsin for advice on whether Neilson should be promoted as a candidate for the presidency of the American Historical Association – which no woman had ever held – Barnes replied carefully. If the position were purely honorary, she advised, then Neilson’s undoubted distinction in scholarship might well qualify her for it. But if administrative ability were a criterion, Neilson’s election would be a disaster for all women in the profession: ‘It seems to me that she has many of the qualities which men ascribe to women in general as reasons for not giving them positions of responsibility, and I therefore feel that the cause of equal treatment for women in historical scholarship would be set back by many years if the first candidate in the important post of president should offer men critics the “I told you so” opportunity.’39 If the early 1930s saw Viola Barnes becoming well established in her profession, and increasingly secure in her employment at Mount Holyoke, it seemed for a time that her family relationships were also entering a period of calm. Don’s marriage in 1925 had inevitably altered the tenor of what had been for many years a close kinship. Yet the fact that his in-laws lived in Northampton, close to South Hadley, opened the prospect of more frequent summer visits even though, until he moved from the University of Washington to Western Reserve University in 1934, he was living on the west coast. They continued to correspond, although not as frequently as before, and exchanged comments on each other’s writing projects. Viola received a warm acknowledgment in Don’s first book in 1930.40 Their father, meanwhile, published his own first book in the same year, also with Viola’s advice and support. The Sod House was a combination of memoir, anecdote, and history, dealing with the settlement of Nebraska during its first thirty years as a state. Among other suggestions, Cass credited Viola with devising the book’s title, to replace the original working title, So This Is Nebraska. ‘It proved,’ he justifiably told her, ‘a good change.’41 By the summer of 1931, with Viola’s encouragement, he was at work on a novel.42 Cass and Isabella had been hard hit by the financial collapse of 1929.

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The failure of the Madison, Nebraska, bank in which Cass kept his newspaper revenues left them, Viola believed, in permanently reduced circumstances.43 Don was not so sure that they were in serious straits, while Cass himself rebuked Viola for her interest in their financial affairs – but gently.44 Compared with the troubled relationships of earlier years, the uneasiness that remained had lost its acerbic edge and reconciliation was in the air. Don commented to Viola in late 1931 that a member of his department ‘is exactly like Father in his vanity, but lacks that sturdy self respect that you can’t help admiring in Father.’ Ruby, who had read Cass’s latest manuscript and saw it more as a memoir than as a novel, thought writing was good for him. ‘They are both very well,’ she reported to Viola, ‘better than I have seen them in years. And I feel it is because he is not carrying a business and its cares and because he keeps busy writing.’45 Cass was also keeping busy with his longstanding political ambitions, and in 1932 he launched a campaign for the Nebraska state legislature. He was not too busy, however, to join with Isabella in sending Viola a warm letter on her forty-seventh birthday. ‘We cherish and love you and are proud of your brave heart,’ they wrote.46 Exactly two weeks later, however, Cass died suddenly of a heart attack at his home in Madison. He was almost eighty-four years old.47 For Viola and her siblings, this was the cue for turbulence to replace tranquillity. Viola’s feelings on her father’s death were as complex as her relationship with him had been. She felt grief, but she also had a sense of release. His ‘imperial sway,’ she confided to a notebook some months later, had extended into ‘encroachments on my spiritual and mental privacy.’ Yet she also believed that she now realized for the first time how his possessiveness had originated in an unrequited ‘hunger for companionship’ with his children. There was no one left who cared as intensely for them as he had done, and thus a core element of their lives had disappeared. For herself, though, she also felt that a part of her father’s spirit had entered her own. She began to recognize in herself traits that had always irritated her in Cass, such as his passion for family history. Even glancing in a mirror would bring a poignant stab of recognition that she physically resembled her father.48 At about the same time, she reflected too on the ‘pangs of regret’ she experienced when a piece of music or a play would rekindle an ‘old haunting feeling of life in a world of beauty.’ She had bypassed her artistic aspirations in favour of ‘a more logical and better-ordered’ way of life. Some cold comfort could be found in the belief that she was ‘too versatile but not gifted enough,’ that she had lacked the talent to flourish in any one artistic discipline. Yet she sus-

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pected too that self-distrust had played some part in destining her to see the promised land of creative achievement only from a distance. She could only ‘look over the wall into the garden.’49 For Viola Barnes, now aged in her late forties, these were more than just the self-doubts of middle age. At one level they revealed a natural and even healthy self-questioning, and an emotional revisiting of paths that now would never be followed, at a time when her father’s death had marked a milestone. Beneath, however, was a maelstrom of dangerously volatile ambiguities and resentments. Ruby and Frank soon felt the results. Viola was critical of Frank for his handling of their father’s estate, and also reacted antagonistically to efforts by Ruby’s husband to help Isabella straighten out her financial affairs.50 Most of all, it was Ruby herself who bore the brunt of Viola’s animosity. Although the issues included complaints about the funeral arrangements Ruby had made and allegations that Ruby and her husband were interfering unduly with their mother’s living arrangements, a central point of contention was the fate of two manuscripts their father had left. Viola had harsh words for Ruby’s plan to revise the fictional manuscript, thinking it unworthy of publication and apparently suggesting that Ruby might try to pass it off as her own. She also complained that Ruby had not sent her a promised copy of the autobiographical memoir that was later published as Nebraska Pioneer. Hurt and shaken, Ruby responded by abandoning her efforts with the novel and by sending Viola both of the extant copies of the memoir. Following the death of a parent, Ruby admonished, ‘we should be drawn closer than ever together despite the miles that separate us. But more than miles separate you and me.’51 Ruby and Viola had had their disagreements over the years, but this one was severe enough to mark a lasting break. With Don, Viola’s relationship remained relatively serene. He wrote warmly in March 1933 to congratulate her on her promotion. At the same time, however, he was troubled by her state of mind. ‘I honestly think,’ he wrote a month later, ‘that you are so suspicious of everybody in the world that I expect you to accuse me of some wild swindle in any letter I receive from you.’52 Don’s comments on Viola’s state of mind, which became more frequent and more vehement as the years went by, came out of a long relationship anchored on Don’s side by childhood admiration of his older sister and his later delight at being accepted by her as an equal when both were graduate students. Viola in turn – more, it seems, to Don than to Ruby – had been a kind influence in early life, and then had valued his fellowship and his sharing of the tensions they

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both experienced with their father. Now each of them was changing. As Viola reached middle age with both achievements and as-yet-unfulfilled ambitions, she could be wary and sensitive. Her watchfulness was a product more of experience than of temperament, although by now the two were becoming closely intertwined. Don, meanwhile, was more and more comfortable in the role of the rising, still-young, male academic. When he editorialized in his letters on Viola’s personal or professional characteristics, he tended increasingly to pronounce rather than support. As yet, the resulting tensions stayed largely unacknowledged. But they set the stage for more overt disturbances later in life. A new family crisis arose in June 1934, when Ruby died of cancer at the age of forty-five. Viola, who was suffering from a recent severe sunburn, again travelled to Nebraska. The loss of her sister was all the more poignant for the fact that she had been unaware that Ruby had been seriously ill for some time. Their mother had known, but apparently chose not to inform Viola, leaving her unprepared – and regretful in later years that she had not visited Ruby during her illness.53 For all that, Viola’s relationship with her mother remained as untroubled as always. Viola often bought or made clothes for Isabella and mailed them to her. Isabella responded gratefully, and in return provided community news and occasional motherly advice. She worried especially that Viola worked too hard. ‘Take a little more exercise,’ she urged in early 1935, ‘more pleasure have good clothes and keep your girlish form so not to be a fat old lady which is not desirable to any body.’54 On 2 February 1936, however, Isabella died, like Cass of heart disease, and at the same age to the day as he had been when he died in 1932.55 This time Viola did not travel west. However, she wrote frequently to Frank, her anxiety over the disposition of the estate compounded by a salary cut recently effected by Mount Holyoke. ‘It is exactly twenty years ago this fall that I first came east,’ she wrote to Frank three days after their mother’s death and on the day of the funeral, ‘since which time I came home at first every year, then afterward every other year except 1930. I have spent enough doing this to have bought me a small house.’56 Tensions between brother and sister were clear in each of the letters, although Viola also worried over the fragility of Frank’s own health, which she attributed to his experiences as a front-line surgeon during the First World War.57 The summer of 1939 saw the estate still unsettled, and even Don was complaining vigorously about Viola’s ‘ugliness’ and mistrustful demeanour. Don had financial troubles of his own by this time, his wife having been diagnosed with cancer in early 1939

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and their health insurance inadequate to pay the hospital bills.58 Stresses between Don and Viola over their mother’s estate eventually proved surmountable, although the strain was evident throughout the late 1930s and for some time after. More permanent was the emotional distance that now separated Viola from her remaining Nebraska relatives. She maintained intermittent contact, and took an interest in her nephew and two nieces. To Ruby’s daughter Elizabeth she wrote in 1938: ‘You are all that is left of Ruby, of whom I was very fond, in spite of our different approaches to many problems in life.’59 Now that Cass and Isabella were gone, however, the ties that bound her to Nebraska had lost much of their resilience. Her own tendencies to suspect and mistrust did nothing to regenerate them. Part of the explanation for Viola Barnes’s family difficulties lay in the uncertainty of her own physical and emotional health, although the succession of deaths in her family between 1932 and 1936 undoubtedly contributed in turn to her frailties. Although 1934 saw her temporarily debilitated by sunburn and then involved, though not seriously injured, in an automobile accident in New Hampshire, the most difficult years were 1935 and 1936.60 During the summer and fall of 1935, Viola experienced the latest of the occurrences of digestive disorders that seemed to coincide with stressful phases of her life. At the same time, she lost thirty pounds in weight over a few months. Now a cancer survivor of some fifteen years’ standing, she feared that cancer of the colon was to blame. Her doctors took the possibility seriously, but tests revealed in early 1936 that the real culprit was ‘nerve shock and exhaustion.’ Her mother’s death soon afterwards can only have intensified the problem. The onset of menopause, in Viola’s later recollection, then prolonged it.61 There were also hints of other factors. Don, although he was making the judgment at long distance, thought that Viola might be drinking too much. ‘Why not rest,’ he prescribed, ‘and drink milk instead of cocktails until you feel normal again?’62 Viola herself saw her depleted finances as a source of stress, and she worried in particular how she could afford the medical bills if she ever did have an extended physical illness. She had arrived at Mount Holyoke in debt from her years at Yale, and since then had paid out much of her salary to support her expenses in living in the Faculty House. Cuts during the Depression years did not help. In none of this was she alone. The Hesseltine-Kaplan study of women holders of doctorates in history in the United States noted in 1943 that ‘taken as a whole, women taught in smaller and poorer schools ... and, presumably, carried heavier teaching loads for

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leaner salaries.’63 Although Barnes was now sufficiently established at Mount Holyoke that she was insulated from the difficulties being experienced by younger women scholars searching for jobs, the shortage of available positions and the related movement of male academics into women’s college faculties inevitably meant stagnation at best for the salaries and working conditions of academic women.64 Barnes had good reason to identify this as a threat to her mental health. Financial difficulties played a precipitating role in Viola Barnes’s decision to move out of Faculty House in the summer of 1935. With Mildred Howard, she rented a rambling – and ‘ramshackly’ – old house on a street close to the campus. For a reduction of some 40 per cent in her rent, she gained abundant living and work space while giving up the luxury of having others to do her cleaning and cooking.65 There was more to the removal, however, than financial constraint. Although Viola maintained later that she and Miff did not yet know each other well, they shared an interest in horse riding and had also sat at the same dining table in Faculty House.66 Miff was the younger of the two by some thirteen years. She had come to Mount Holyoke in 1927 as an instructor, took her master’s degree at Columbia in 1930, and thereafter headed the Mount Holyoke department of physical education.67 Domestic friction emerged soon after they had set up house, but it was friction that showed the relationship to have emotional as well as utilitarian dimensions. While the two were still at the stage of painting rooms and selecting curtains, a vigorous argument led Viola to send Miff what amounted to an ultimatum. They must agree that there would be few if any ‘out-oftown, in-the-house, guests’ during the school year, so as not to disturb working schedules. They must also experiment with doing their own cleaning, which Miff had been unwilling to do. Underlying these issues, however, was another. Miff had brought a female friend from Boston to advise on decorating. Viola objected to what she saw as interference. ‘I have no desire,’ she professed, ‘to dictate about your relationship there, your trips up or what you do with her’; but decisions about the house must be made exclusively by Miff and herself. ‘I love you, and want to do what you wish,’ Viola continued, but she refused ‘to be in bondage directly or indirectly to another person who not only is not my friend but whom I dislike and whose judgment I distrust.’68 At least for the time being, the argument over cleaning went in favour of Viola, who commented to her brother Frank in early 1936 that she and Miff were ‘doing our own work to save money.’69 More importantly, the relationship continued. More than that, it thrived. Viola and

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Mildred Howard, as a young athlete (Mount Holyoke College Archives and Special Collections)

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Miff lived together in the house until 1952, and even then they retired to custom-built adjoining properties in a newly developed area of South Hadley. Although Viola had made it clear in her letter of 1935 that it need not be an exclusive relationship, it was certainly a committed one. Their correspondence when separated – when Miff went to her family cottage in Connecticut in the summer or when one or the other was travelling – was warm and affectionate. ‘Now the question in my mind is this,’ wrote Miff in one such letter in July 1936: ‘When shall I see you again? Much, much love, Mildred.’70 Although by now – as heterosexual relationships had become freer and more open in the United States of the 1920s – the notion of a ‘Boston marriage’ had come to seem oldfashioned and even unconventional, it remained normal enough at Mount Holyoke for two women to live together.71 ‘Doing things in twos ...,’ said Viola Barnes herself in 1972, ‘was very common in those days ... And there was never any idea of the current present twentieth century connotation that is unpleasant.’72 Yet there was something disingenuous about her comment, for she had had her own censorious moments. During the search for a new member of the department of history in 1939, for example, she was determined that the successful candidate should not be of ‘the kind subject to emotional friendships.’ More specifically, she did not want the ‘type’ who would be ‘kissing Miss N. good night every night.’73 Her dislike for Neilson certainly influenced her statement, but her more substantive objection appears to have been to relationships that led to favouritism in professional contexts. Since she and Miff were in separate and dissimilar departments, and kept their professional lives apart from one another, this was not an issue. Or so Viola would undoubtedly have contended if the matter had been raised. More important as it was, the relationship was passionate and joyful. It may or may not have been physically expressed. But however expressed, it offered to Viola a blessed release from the tangle of stresses that her own family relationships had become. As the 1930s went on, there were also stresses in college affairs. Among the greatest were the controversies that accompanied the retirement of Mary Woolley, effective in 1937, and the announcement in June 1936 that her successor would be Roswell G. Ham.74 The appointment of a male president – the first in Mount Holyoke’s history – after a process conducted in secrecy, was contentious enough in itself. Matters were complicated by reports reaching the campus that, as an associate professor of English at Yale, Ham had been turned down for a full professorship and would have had to leave Yale in any event.75 Thus, the issue

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came to turn not only on gender itself but also on the related concern that Yale was asserting its imperial role in the region by foisting a candidate on Mount Holyoke who was judged inadequate for its own purposes but perfectly fine for presiding over a women’s college. Mary Woolley and her partner Jeannette Marks became directly involved. While Marks organized protests and tried unsuccessfully to induce the board of trustees to cancel Ham’s appointment, Woolley made no secret of her own disapproval and refused to meet her successor either officially or socially. After Woolley left office in the summer of 1937, she never returned to the campus during the remaining ten years of her life.76 Viola Barnes took little public role in the debates over Ham’s appointment, but became involved nevertheless. Although she had doubts about Ham, she supported his appointment and deplored the actions of Marks and Woolley. She remained grateful to Woolley for supporting her research and for protecting her from pressures within her department at crucial moments, but believed by now that Woolley had stayed on too long as president and could have served the institution best by leaving quietly and gracefully. Barnes accepted the word of the trustees that a number of women had been offered the presidency and had turned it down. One of those who did so, and then made the fact widely known in support of the trustees, was Barnes’s longstanding friend Marjorie Nicolson. Although she had decided against accepting the position, Nicolson affirmed that the trustees had strongly pressed her to do so, and that their preference for the appointment of a woman had been selfevident.77 Barnes accepted this, and it was confirmed to her by one of the trustees, Florence Purington, who was a retired Mount Holyoke dean. That the deliberations themselves had been conducted in secret, Barnes found annoying but ultimately came to regard as a conventional practice rather than a sinister one. Accordingly, she – along with some others of the younger faculty and a few more senior figures such as Ada Snell of the English department and the chemist Emma Perry Carr – took a position that was privately endorsed by Purington. Ham, they believed, must be welcomed and given a chance as president. The trustees were not about to reverse the decision already publicly announced, and to protest at this point would do harm to the institution. If, after a reasonable time, Ham proved to be a failure as president, then would be the time to press for his removal.78 It was in this context that Barnes wrote supportively both to the chair of the board, Alva Morrison, and to Ham himself. She also assured the Wisconsin historian Louise Phelps Kellogg that Ham was ‘a scholar and one interested in academic ideas.’79

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In all of this, Barnes saw herself as a member of a moderate group, trying unobtrusively to limit the damage done by what became a very public argument. ‘I feel very sad,’ she observed to Kellogg, ‘that our local war gets into the papers so conspicuously when we are so widely known as a center of interest in world peace.’80 Ironically, she soon came to regard Ham to be just as unimpressive a president as his detractors had predicted, but felt powerless to harness any organized dissent. Her perspective on Ham’s early years was that ‘he soon found out about our group and we were crushed between two mill stones.’81 In his eagerness to placate his most vigorous critics, Barnes believed, he went to extremes to cater to them at the expense of those who had been his supporters. Rightly or wrongly, Barnes felt personally targeted. Drafting a letter on Ham’s cooling attitude towards her, she confided that ‘our Bryn Mawr quartet will tell him I am difficult (God help me if I am more so than they are!)’82 By the ‘Bryn Mawr quartet’ in her department, Barnes meant Neilson, Putnam, Ellis, and the more recently appointed medievalist Jessie Tatlock. During the late 1930s, she pursued her latest struggle against this group, this time over the issue of elected department chairs. For Barnes, this was an issue related to that of the presidency, for she maintained that opposition to Ham had been more widespread among the entrenched ranks of the department heads than among the faculty as a whole. She also blamed the ‘outmoded system’ of appointing permanent department heads for a range of other ills afflicting the college. ‘It is at the root of most of Mount Holyoke’s serious troubles,’ she informed one of the trustees: ‘the inbreeding, the extravagances, the lack of organization, the compulsion on the student in course selection, the conservatism, etc.’83 She might have added, of course, that it was also this system that had kept Nellie Neilson in charge of the department of history since 1905. Much as Barnes seems to have attempted to put a tactful gloss on the matter when speaking out in a department meeting in late 1936, by calling for implementation of ‘the system of elected department chairmanships upon the completion of present chairmanships,’ the personal dimension of the issue would have been unmistakable to all.84 The longstanding friction showed again in early 1937, as Barnes wrote to Neilson about receiving a disappointingly small salary increase. She did not ascribe the ineffectiveness of Neilson’s support in this area, she assured her, to any lack of good intentions, but rather to ‘the fact that administrative matters do not specially interest you and are not your long suit.’85 Later in the year, Barnes took a different tack. To a department meeting,

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she presented a paper calling for American history to be recognized as a ‘field major’ within the department, but one that also purported to show that she (along with Tatlock) was overworked and underpaid. Predictably enough, it aroused lengthy discussion but prompted no action.86 Within the department of history, the point of stagnation had been reached, and Barnes bore her share of the responsibility for the sterile disputes that persisted. Nevertheless, two developments put change in the air. Both, despite Barnes’s increasingly poor opinion of Ham, had a connection with the new president. One of them concerned the department itself. In 1937, Bertha Putnam retired. Apparently under pressure from Ham, the sixty-six-year-old Neilson followed in 1939. Who would succeed her as head or chair? Ellen Ellis, as the only political scientist, was not a serious candidate. Tatlock, although she was older than Barnes, was more junior in rank and experience. Despite objections from Neilson, Ellis, and Tatlock – although Neilson may eventually have acquiesced reluctantly – Ham appointed Barnes as chair. There would be no election. Ironically, had there been one, Barnes could not have won it. Instead, she would serve a one-year term, renewable at the president’s pleasure. Ellis, meanwhile, became chair of a separate department of political science.87 The second development originated in Viola Barnes’s interest in combining cultural with political history, but it proceeded too from Ham’s enthusiasm for interdepartmental majors. As first implemented, an interdepartmental major was taken to involve two subjects and did not necessarily involve any integration between them. Barnes, however, proposed to her dean a more cohesive program in American culture: I explained that to me the difference was that the inter-departmental major was like the dessert choice at a Thanksgiving dinner, when the hostess says which kind of pie do you want, apple, mince or pumpkin? And you say, give me a sliver of each. That is your inter-departmental major. The culture major is like a cake. It is not a cake until the various ingredients are mixed together and baked. The culture of a country at a given time would be shown by its literature, its music, its philosophy, its art, a combination. A typical subject or topic might be the growth of a national feeling as shown in these various subjects.88

Although it was several years before the American Culture major was formally introduced, Barnes received the dean’s approval to begin it informally as a variant of the interdepartmental major. The first student

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graduated in 1939, and in future years the program enabled Barnes not only to teach a form of American history that fitted with the breadth of her interests, but also to experiment with interdisciplinary teaching methods.89 Although Mount Holyoke during the late 1930s offered to Barnes a mix of frustrations and opportunities, she was proud of her role in the celebration of the college’s centenary in 1937. Working on a three-person committee with Snell and Carr, she pressed the trustees to commission a history of the college – and one written by a professional historian, rather than ‘with loving care by alumnae from within.’90 The committee’s choice of author was Arthur C. Cole, a historian of the Civil War era who was a colleague of Barnes’s brother Don at Western Reserve University. It took a threat of resignation by the three committee members to persuade the trustees to agree, but eventually Cole produced a study that was published in 1940 to approving reviews. The chair of the trustees was regretful that the book had missed the centenary by three years. For Barnes, it was more important that it was ‘a project in American social history, and of value in the historical world for its own sake.’91 Yet much of the satisfaction that Viola Barnes took from her work as a historian was connected with her involvement in a professional world outside of her own institution. She was active from the beginning in the Berkshire Historical Conference. When founded in 1929, as the Lakeville History Group, the organization was a response to the emergence during the 1920s of informal gatherings of male historians from which women were excluded.92 Membership was open to faculty members from women’s colleges in New England, New York, and New Jersey, with those from the ‘Seven Sisters’ colleges predominating. As envisaged by the founders Louise Ropes Loomis and Louise Fargo Brown, who was the first president, it would be an informal group. Rather than following a set program, the members would spend a spring weekend together at a country inn. Conversation – as Barnes recalled it, ‘about current research in our fields and about education at our respective centers’ – could be outdoor or indoor, during hikes, over coffee, or at dinner. Absent would be ‘papers, crusades, edifying meetings.’93 Although this did not hold true altogether, even during the 1930s, it was true that the most serious purpose of the organization was to develop friendship and communication among women historians as a way of easing their path into the profession and its higher ranks. The group soon began also to organize an annual breakfast at the meetings of the American Historical Association, open to all women attendees. ‘The official historical

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On campus, 1937 (Mount Holyoke College Archives and Special Collections)

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societies,’ Barnes commented later, ‘were then monopolized by the men ... We did not even get to meet each other, so that was one reason for our organization.’ As put by another of the early members, Mildred Campbell, the purpose of the breakfast was ‘to give women from colleges scattered all over the country, a place to go and be comfortable during the Association meetings, particularly women who knew no one at the Conference.’94 As the organization’s original title indicated, the first of the spring meetings took place at Lakeville, Connecticut. Connecticut locations continued to be favoured until 1933, when the group was unexpectedly forced to crowd into four uncomfortable rooms of an annex to the White Hart Inn in Salisbury. With Louise Fargo Brown about to go on sabbatical, Viola Barnes was voted in as president. She attributed her election to the shortcomings of the White Hart Inn: I was elected president, in spite of being one of the younger members, ... because I lived the nearest to the Berkshires and so could hunt a place of the sort they drilled me in getting. A better inn, with fine comfortable rooms and private baths if possible, though we were to pay a very small sum and there was to be no group deposit in advance of meeting, for reservations. It must be where it was beautiful for walking (driving was practically out of the question through lack of cars) and the older members specified a large porch with rocking chairs.95

Barnes consolidated her position as president by finding the right location at the Red Lion Inn, in Stockbridge, Massachusetts. The Red Lion became the normal spring meeting place, and in 1935 the group adopted the name ‘Berkshire Historical Conference.’96 In reality, of course, Barnes’s presidency was based on more than her ability to book hotel rooms. She was a leading and enthusiastic participant, so described by Margaret Judson of Rutgers: ‘[A]n organizer and leader of our outdoor ventures, ... Vi was always an active participant in our evening discussions of history and of women’s problems in the profession.’97 She also steered the organization in the direction of more actively promoting the interests of women historians. At the meeting at which she was elected in 1933, Barnes was also asked on the basis of her experience teaching at Smith College to lead the discussion of a plan to foster exchange professorships for women. The first substantive initiative of the Berkshire Conference, originally broached in 1931, this remained a priority for some years to come.98

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Viola Barnes remained president of the Berkshire group until 1938. Despite the professedly informal character of the spring meetings, a number of issues were debated and positions agreed. The exchange professorships were promoted on the ground that ‘women as a rule have much less opportunity than men do, to move from one post to another, so we feel that the exchange system would give us that variety of experience which men get from change in posts.’99 In 1934, an attempt was made to extend the scope of the exchanges to Latin America and Europe, although enquiries revealed over the two following years that disappointingly few institutions in the United States or elsewhere were seriously interested.100 In 1935, the group agreed to express concern over the increasing control exercised by schools of education, at the expense of liberal education, over the qualifications for schoolteachers.101 By 1938, a series of possible topics was being circulated in preparation for the evening discussions, including the ‘professional outlook for women.’ Barnes had already written to the members in the previous year to launch the idea of pressing for salary equality between male and female academics, and of ‘perhaps a crusade in the interests of equal opportunity for women in professional competition with men, through the establishment of bureaus with lists of potential candidates for administrative posts, not with the idea of becoming assertive in a militant way, but of correcting the tendency to let opportunities go by default.’102 The caution of the language was revealing, and the idea was apparently soon eclipsed in favour of concentrating on promoting the candidacy of women for influential positions in professional organizations. Nevertheless, the range of issues canvassed – as well as the efforts now launched within the American Historical Association – confirmed that the Berkshire Conference had emerged as a significant advocacy group for the interests of women historians, and that Viola Barnes had taken a substantial role.103 Other than the Berkshire Conference, and her activities on the American Historical Association’s nominating committee (1934–6) and program committee (1939), Barnes’s professional activities outside of Mount Holyoke centred on her research and publication. Her relationship with Charles McLean Andrews became warmer after he sent her a copy of the Pulitzer Prize–winning first volume of his work on The Colonial Period of American History with a handwritten endorsement praising her work. She was touched by the gesture, and he by her response. ‘Dear Viola,’ began the letter in which he said so.104 Her correspondence with other historians included an acknowledgment from Brebner of her

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‘crisp evaluation’ – it was in fact a sharply critical review – of his Neutral Yankees of Nova Scotia in the American Historical Review.105 As for her own publications during these years, from 1937 to 1940 Barnes contributed a series of articles to the Dictionary of American History, mainly on seventeenth-century topics. Ironically, the general editor of the project was James Truslow Adams.106 Her services were also in demand from book publishers. In early 1935, she was offered a contract by the University of North Carolina Press for a book manuscript on ‘The History of the Writing of American History,’ which she had had in preparation since the late 1920s. For whatever reason, the contract remained among her papers, unsigned.107 Almost three years later, she did agree to write a textbook on colonial history for W.W. Norton. ‘We have definitely set our hearts on this book,’ the publisher informed her as she hesitated before signing.108 Barnes’s main preoccupation, however, remained her research manuscript. Although it was substantially completed, she spent her summers labouring to polish and perfect it. The winters she spent worrying about how to raise the funds that might be demanded by a university press to publish it. Andrews assured her in 1937 that her predicament was not unusual, but congratulated her on bringing the work to near-completion and counselled her to make use of the delay to spend time on ‘revising form and style, both of which need constant attention.’109 Future years would see her taking this advice all too literally. Thus, by the beginning of 1939, Viola Barnes was a recognized leader in her field, and a demonstrably accomplished teacher. Louise Fargo Brown had written from Vassar in 1938 that she and her colleagues would have liked to try to tempt her away from Mount Holyoke if only they could have offered a full professorship. The advice they had received was that Barnes was ‘of course far and away the best woman in American history.’110 It was true that to some, including members both of her department and of her family, she was a difficult and frustrating person. Yet to others, including the members of the Berkshire Conference who elected her president for five years and welcomed her to meetings for decades thereafter, her humour and vitality were more evident. According to Merle Curti, the same was true of her service with American Historical Association committees, her colleagues on which had ‘often spoken of her admirable gifts in cooperative ventures.’111 She was, in truth, more troubled in health and spirit than most were allowed to see – unless they somehow aroused her anger. Her relationship with Mildred Howard offered a possibility that the balance would

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be tipped towards the more expansive side of her personality. So did her research and her professional involvements, for it was as a professional woman – and a busy one – that she could see herself in a bright and enhancing light. But the balance was a delicate one even at the best of times.

CH APTE R 4

‘I want to build a good strong department’: Maturity, 1939–1950

From early 1939 onwards, Viola Barnes was in the unaccustomed position of occupying a leading position in the department of history at Mount Holyoke. Although Nellie Neilson did not retire formally until the summer, for all practical purposes Barnes took over the department chair in January. Her first task was to recruit Neilson’s replacement. ‘I want to build a good strong department and we need exactly what you have to offer,’ she told one candidate who fulfilled her criteria: a woman, but not a medievalist.1 To her regret and discouragement, however, Barnes was not a success as a department administrator. At the behest of the college president, her term was not renewed in 1942. Opinions differed about the sources of the discord that had prevailed. Barnes herself blamed the continuing influence of Neilson; others blamed her own lack of diplomacy. Either way, the three years were difficult, and for Viola Barnes they set a tone for the 1940s as a whole. Compensations did exist: an honorary degree from the University of Nebraska in 1941, continuing success as a teacher, and a new sojourn in London in 1949. Yet even London, in its postwar drabness, was a disappointment. Revisiting old haunts long inaccessible in wartime could not quite rekindle the elation that had inspired the writing of the still-unpublished manuscript she sought now to perfect. Other publication opportunities had fallen by the wayside as she concentrated on this mature work in which so much of her younger self had been invested. Yet as she approached retirement it remained stubbornly unfinished, at least in her own eyes. Viola Barnes had hoped to be appointed department chair, but it was a surprise when President Ham called her to his office in late January 1939 and designated her as Neilson’s successor.2 Only a few days before, she had written ruefully to Bertha Putnam about the stout opposition

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to her appointment that was being mounted by Neilson, Ellis, and Tatlock – and apologizing to Putnam for thinking that she too had been involved. As Barnes later reconstructed what had changed so suddenly, she concluded that Neilson had reluctantly accepted that Barnes was the only historian senior enough for the chair. The alternative, to appoint the political scientist Ellis, would endanger the pre-eminence of history in the department. As Barnes remembered it, Ham had said during their interview, ‘For the time being, I can’t do anything else. You’re appointed for one year.’ Neilson had been equally sparing with her congratulations: ‘Remember it’s for one year only. I will certainly make it uncomfortable for you if you stay on any longer.’3 In Barnes’s view, she had taken over a department weakened by Neilson’s erratic judgment when hirings had taken place. Now that Ellis was departing to form her own department, four members remained. Barnes was critical of the other three for the quality of their teaching, their scholarship, or both. She worried too about the concentration of their scholarly areas: both Jessie Tatlock and Frederick Cramer were medievalists, while Frank Bailey was a modern Europeanist. Although such considerations were reasonable enough, she also nourished personal feelings. With Bailey she got along well, although she doubted whether he would ever become a productive scholar. Tatlock she regarded as part of the Bryn Mawr group, and mistrusted her accordingly. For Cramer, a German Jewish refugee, she reserved another form of animosity. While the evidence suggests that she was pleasant enough to his face, in private correspondence with others she referred to him, regularly and dismissively, simply as ‘the Jew.’4 Barnes had undoubtedly learned her antiSemitic instincts at home. Although references to Jews were not frequent in surviving correspondence of members of her family, neither were they complimentary.5 The climate at the eastern women’s colleges in the interwar years, as at other higher-education institutions, was also receptive to anti-Semitism as long as it was discreetly clothed. Not only was there a legacy of direct anti-Jewish prejudice, even extending to such an eminent pioneer of women’s education as M. Carey Thomas, but also it was an established orthodoxy among senior administrators that too great a proportion of Jewish students would diminish a college’s prestige. Quotas were common, though never publicly admitted.6 To all of this, through her private disparagement of Cramer and perhaps in other ways that left no permanent record, Viola Barnes contributed her share. As department chair, Barnes also had to confront another issue that brought her personal attitudes and commitments to the fore: the role of

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Professor and department chair, 1940 (Mount Holyoke College Archives and Special Collections)

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gender in hiring. Over the years, Barnes had been a suffragist and, notably at Yale and through the Berkshire Conference, a steadfast defender of equal opportunities for academic women. She had shown little sign, however, of becoming a feminist in the sense of favouring sustained social or political action to overturn the existing gender hierarchy. Like many professional and intellectual women of the interwar era, Barnes thought more readily in terms of facilitating the advancement of individual women than of the collective interests of women as a larger social grouping.7 Even on an individual basis, there were times when she inadvertently revealed biases of her own. When recommending one woman for an academic post in 1939, for example, she added some personal observations to her appraisal. The candidate, Barnes wrote, ‘dresses smartly and in good taste, which is not always the case with academic women ... She is a thoroughly kindly person, without any of the petty malice and selfishness which so often mars the effectiveness of academic women.’8 Stereotypes aside, it was consistent with Barnes’s individualistic approach to gender questions that, whenever pressed, she would declare herself unequivocally in favour of recruiting the best scholar into her department, whether male or female. On one possible candidate, she wrote, ‘I wish he were a woman, but we want a scholar first of all, so naturally consider both sexes.’9 To Wallace Notestein, she explained her position more fully, contrasting it unfavourably with that she attributed to her Bryn Mawr colleagues: ‘I consider Miss Neilson’s plea when her women friends urge another woman, irrespective of scholarship or anything else, as one of those crusades for the rights of women as women. But isn’t it better to consider the young women students, and for their sakes, get the very best the market affords? That is what I am trying desperately to do.’10 Yet in reality Barnes’s hiring practices were more complex. Although she would have been reluctant to admit it outside of a circle of professional friends that coincided roughly with the Berkshire group, she operated a kind of de facto affirmative action that centred on searching more vigorously for female than for male candidates. Barnes showed little or no interest in theoretical consideration of the variety of perspectives that could be described as ‘feminist’ during the interwar years, nor does the evidence suggest that she developed an explicit analysis of underlying societal reasons for gender disparity. At the same time, she never wavered in her determination to make academic life more accessible to able women. Actions rather than words or concepts defined her approach, but it was based on a liberal feminist belief in the need for

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women to act collectively through separate organizations to ensure that individual women were able to compete effectively with men in their chosen professions.11 At Mount Holyoke the appointment of a male candidate to Neilson’s position, she was acutely aware, would result in a male majority in her department. This development did ultimately take place, with the hiring in the spring of 1939 of Henry Grattan (a Yaletrained English intellectual historian), but not before Barnes had made strenuous attempts to attract a female scholar. One of her first actions after being named as the next department chair was to write to her counterpart at Vassar, Violet Barbour: I would hate to encroach on your prerogatives, or poach on your preserves, but you know how I feel about the fact that women as scholars never seem to get the chance that men have to be called from post to post, winning the distinction that such calls bring outside of the college as well as the attention of the college inside. I made up my mind the very first step I took that I would use all the influence on Mr. Ham that I could, to call a woman and a cracking good one, so that he could not afterward say, I knew a woman would not be as good as a man, as he might if I brought an inexperienced one here.12

By early April, two strong women candidates had refused the position, and another had failed to answer repeated telegrams offering an interview. Only then – and under pressure, by Barnes’s account, from President Ham – was the search concluded with Grattan’s appointment on a short-term contract.13 At a broader strategic level, Barnes intended as chair to steer her department away from its traditional concentration on English medieval history. Instead, she hoped to establish a new balance in which British and European specializations in ancient, medieval, and modern periods would be complemented by her own work in American history. As she put it to a correspondent soon after her appointment, she wanted ‘to abolish medieval history as the Established Church, though giving it a prominent place.’14 Grattan’s appointment was consistent with this goal, but over the ensuing two years further vacancies resulted from his departure in 1941 and the loss of Bailey to war service shortly after the United States entered the Second World War. This time, Barnes started early to gather the names of female candidates. Although she was pessimistic about the chances, because of the male majority in the department, she wrote to one correspondent in October 1940: ‘I am making every effort

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to see to it that the next addition to the department is a woman.’ To another, she confided that ‘in order to be fore-handed and anticipate any trend toward another man, I am making a list of candidates in the fields of possible openings.’ To a third, in December, she appealed, ‘Please send me credentials of good women in these fields.’15 This time, however, it was the president himself who frustrated her efforts. A leading candidate, by January, was Norma Adams. Barnes had misgivings because Adams was a medievalist, but also because she had been an undergraduate and a master’s student of Neilson’s and remained close to her mentor.16 In February, however, President Ham abruptly announced the appointment of a male, Harvard-based medievalist Dana Durand. ‘Needless to say,’ Barnes commented to a friend, ‘I am beside myself with rage. But what can one do?’17 Ultimately, as a consequence of Bailey’s departure, Adams was also appointed to the department. As Barnes pointed out with chagrin in her annual report, this brought the number of medievalists among the full-time faculty to four out of five. ‘The chairman regrets very much,’ she observed, ‘that ... the department returns to the same old over-balance of the medieval which hindered its progress for so many years.’18 This was not her only regret. In Barnes’s perception, her period as department chair was characterized by a war on two fronts: with the president and with insurgent department members. It was true that she had repeated disputes with Ham, primarily over hiring. Although he had asked her in 1940 to accept a two-year extension to her original oneyear appointment as chair, it was no surprise in 1942 when no reappointment was offered.19 With her colleagues, matters were more complex. Barnes’s own interpretation of the quarrels that took place – some over individual issues such as promotion and salary, others over such policy matters as course offerings and the allocation of scarce library resources – was that they stemmed from grievances created by difficult decisions she had had to make. Her efforts to move the department away from medieval history and to prevent the rewarding of mediocrity by promotion, she believed, had been resented all the more because of a disagreement over teaching methods. While other members of the department presented lectures for the passive consumption of students, she encouraged discussion and critical analysis – reaping large course enrolments thereby. Once resentment had been aroused, she observed, ‘henceforth the members of the department pooled their every grievance no matter how slight.’20 The damage was compounded by the president’s willingness to listen to complaints without hearing her side of the story,

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she argued, and by the influence of Neilson’s continuing efforts in her retirement to resist change in the department.21 However, it was true also that, for somewhat different reasons in each case, Barnes took a jaundiced view of each one of her colleagues. Especially when under stress, she had never been good at conveying goodwill when what she was feeling was the opposite. The slights she had cast upon department members were not necessarily as imaginary as she believed them to be, whether it was in trying unsuccessfully in 1940 to have Cramer denied permanent employment or in describing her colleagues sweepingly as teaching ‘according to methods current fifty years ago.’22 That they found her style of leadership overbearing and at times threatening was deeply ironic in view of her criticisms of Neilson over the years. But the perception was not as far-fetched as her protests might have indicated. Barnes ended her term in the chair with a profound sense of failure. The department continued to be disproportionately populated by medievalists – although Tatlock would retire a year later – and the fact that it had a majority of female members was owed not to her efforts but to the departure of Bailey to the navy. ‘Somehow,’ she wrote to one of the trustees, ‘I feel as though I could endure the agony of these last two years if I did not now have the feeling that they had been in vain.’23 Ironically, war service also led in the following year to a change in the balance of fields represented. Durand left to serve in the army, and did not return after the war. His replacement was Wilma Pugh – thus, a medievalist was exchanged for a specialist on the French Revolution. Pugh was a westerner who at an earlier stage in her career had studied United States history at the University of Wyoming. She was also a member of Kappa Kappa Gamma. Initially, Barnes welcomed her warmly, introducing her to sorority meetings in nearby Amherst and to the Berkshire Conference. By late 1948, however, Barnes was arguing both to Cramer (now department chair) and to Ham that Pugh should not be retained. Although Barnes’s rationale had to do with Pugh’s teaching range, which she considered narrowly confined to revolutionary France, Pugh’s impression was that a grudge arising from the preference of a bright honours student for Pugh’s supervision over Barnes’s was the real issue.24 Whatever Barnes’s motivation, it precipitated yet another controversy over the department’s personnel, although Pugh did obtain her renewal the following year. There was also, again, more than a trace of irony in Barnes’s pursuit of a younger colleague in circumstances where personal animus was at least suspected, when she herself had taken such lasting umbrage over a similar experience at the hands of Neilson twenty years before.

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Viola Barnes’s conflict with the Bryn Mawr group also continued well into the 1940s, even though that group had virtually disappeared from the department. Barnes had maintained her scepticism regarding the efforts of other women historians to have Nellie Neilson elected as second vice-president, and thus eventually president, of the American Historical Association. More reconciled with Bertha Putnam, she argued strongly in 1939 that Putnam had ‘always most courageously supported the cause of women,’ while Neilson had not. If collective efforts were to be made on behalf of a candidate, in her view it should be to elect Putnam to the council rather than Neilson to the vice-presidency. When Neilson was elected in 1940, however, and when she served her term as president in 1942–3, Barnes appears to have kept her strictures to herself.25 Not so with her belief that Neilson still sought to control the department. The later 1940s brought some reconciliation with others, and notably Cramer, whose administration of the department she praised in 1946.26 But this may have reflected in part the view of departmental conflicts that she had developed by 1943 as an extension of her suspicions of Neilson: ‘I think that most people agree with me that the blame, if one wishes to call it that, rests rather with the situation of the retired faculty who are fanatically sincere in their position, but fifty years behind the times. The rest of us have been merely victims.’27 This view of the matter was at the root of the tensions that rapidly developed between Barnes and Norma Adams. Although a newcomer to the department, Adams was Barnes’s immediate successor in the chair. To Adams herself, following arguments over the place of American history in the curriculum, Barnes only hinted at the role she attributed to Neilson by remarking on Adams’s ‘borrowed conservatism.’ To Ham, she was more blunt. ‘It is in a way worse than if Miss Neilson had not retired,’ she ventured, ‘for it is harder on the standards of the department to have her driving from the back seat than from the front.’28 She and Neilson, meanwhile, had few if any civil words to say to one another. On a small campus in a small town, it was inevitable that they should meet – but it was inadvertent when they did. While Neilson generally avoided speaking to Barnes, Barnes in turn adopted a conscious policy of not attending any events where she knew Neilson would be.29 Others were perplexed at the depth of the feelings involved. Wilma Pugh, while noting that Norma Adams visited Neilson regularly out of friendship, rejected the idea that Neilson used the visits to attempt to influence departmental affairs. Another younger department member was courageous enough in conversation to suggest that Barnes was hold-

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ing on unduly to old grievances. Barnes’s response to ‘your statement that you thought I let the bitterness of earlier years here interfere with present problems’ was predictably dismissive. She took time to think about it, but only in order to compose a scathing four-page rebuttal.30 But the sour stalemate that now prevailed was, at best, a sad reflection of nearly thirty years of tangled antipathies that had brought no good to any of those involved. To Barnes – aggrieved, suspicious, caustic – they had done more harm than she was in any frame of mind to realize. Yet the early 1940s had also brought Viola Barnes new honours. In late 1940 she was ‘surprised and delighted’ to be named one of a hundred successful career women invited to attend a ‘Women’s Centennial Congress’ organized by the veteran feminist Carrie Chapman Catt.31 Commemorating the exclusion of women delegates to the World Antislavery Conference of 1840, and celebrating the drive for sexual equality that the rejected delegates had begun, the congress was a cooperative effort of thirteen national women’s organizations. The hundred career women were drawn from education, medicine, the trade unions, business, government, the law and law enforcement, and other fields. Eleanor Roosevelt headed the list, while Barnes was one of only five historians invited.32 She undoubtedly owed the distinction in part to her participation in the Berkshire group, in which she continued to be active on such matters as keeping updated files on the qualifications of women who might be prospective candidates for academic positions, the nomination of women – especially young women – for book prizes sponsored by the American Historical Association, and the election of women to the council and committees of the association itself. The Berkshire Conference subgroup on this last issue, however, for which Barnes was the spokesperson in 1940, made no mention of the second vice-presidency.33 Barnes herself served during the early 1940s both on the association’s program committee and as chair of the selection committee for the John H. Dunning Prize, awarded for the outstanding monograph by a young historian.34 Thus, Barnes’s nomination to the centennial congress was based on service to her profession and to its women members, as well as on her own scholarly prowess. It was, she eventually learned, Louise Pound who had pressed her candidacy. ‘Why not?’ asked Pound. ‘Members of the good old gang! I try not to miss a chance.’35 There was, however, an odd sequel. Barnes heard about her nomination, and (after the event) about the congress itself in New York in late November 1940, from the New York Times. She wrote apologetically to Catt that she had some-

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how misfiled her unopened invitation, discovering it more than a month later. Although she was a nominee, therefore, she had no opportunity to take part in the actual deliberations of the congress or to be personally recognized among its delegates.36 There was no mistake in the following year over Louise Pound’s next endeavour. ‘Meeting this afternoon,’ read a postcard sent by Pound to Barnes in late April 1941: ‘All went off mighty well! Project practically “in the bag.”’37 Soon afterwards Barnes was offered an honorary degree by the University of Nebraska, ‘in recognition of your distinguished service in the field of history.’38 She lost no time in accepting, and in welcoming an invitation to stay with Louise and Olivia Pound. ‘I keep pinching myself,’ she wrote to Louise Pound. ‘I do so wish my Father or Ruby were alive and could be there. After all, one never fully outgrows the family as audience.’39 The ceremony on 9 June 1941 put Barnes’s picture on the front page of Lincoln’s Evening State Journal. Two days earlier, she had been guest of honour at a dinner marking the twentieth anniversary of the founding of the Nebraska chapter of the Mortar Board Honor Society. Established nationally in 1918 as an honour society for senior college women, Mortar Board had absorbed the Black Masque in 1921. Thus, Barnes was able to reconnect with contemporaries from the Black Masque and Kappa Kappa Gamma, as well as meet younger members. ‘They all seemed,’ she later observed, ‘much the sort of people that used to be in the club.’40 Thus far, all had gone much as she had hoped. The mood changed, however, at what proved to be a strained family lunch. Intended to be a celebration, it proved in Viola’s view to be more like ‘a business conclave’ – a reference, presumably, to continuing arguments over her mother’s estate. Worse still, to her mind, she discovered that her mother’s brother Henry and his wife, who had lived in Albion, had died some two years earlier and that none of the family had informed her. Offended, she left Nebraska immediately and never returned.41 Even before Viola Barnes’s visit to Lincoln, the 1940s had been unkind to her family. Tensions over the estate were intractable. More minor but still pointed was Viola’s chiding of her Nebraska relatives in mid-1940 for refusing to send her photographs for a proposed family history.42 Then, soon afterwards, Don’s wife Margaret died of cancer. Viola invited Don to stay with her if the funeral were to be held in the east. But she herself was not anxious to attend, explaining to Don, ‘I think I won’t go to the services if they are in Boston, perhaps not even if they are in Northampton, since I do not know Catholic ways.’43 To Miff, she con-

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fided more intimately. Though she was more shocked than grieved by Margaret’s death, she said, ‘it brought back all the many other deaths in our family and left me very blue and lonely.’44 Following the abrupt conclusion of her sojourn in Lincoln, among her Nebraska relatives she maintained contact for the time being only with her nephew. Frank Junior, or ‘Bud,’ had shown an early interest in family history and had corresponded with both Viola and Don during his teenage years. In 1944, however, as an air force pilot, Bud was killed in the crash of a training flight near Sioux City, Iowa.45 Over time, Viola would re-establish regular contact with other family members, but for the moment wariness prevailed. ‘I shall be sixty years old this summer,’ she informed one of her nieces in 1945, ‘so I cannot wait much longer to find out which ones of my distant relatives are friendly.’ Even so, she added, ‘I have often wished that members of my family lived a little nearer.’46 In the same letter, Viola also observed that her friends had become, in effect, her family: ‘I have ... for so long made my home among friends, that as the years go by they are the ones I know and understand and lean on.’47 First among them was Miff, although in June 1939 Viola had a reminder of a much earlier relationship when Fred Ballard wrote to congratulate her on becoming department chair. Well into the 1950s, within a few years of his death in 1957, Ballard continued to write her occasionally as an old friend, and she to respond.48 With Miff she enjoyed, for the most part, an easy partnership. It was true that Viola’s emotional and physical health again caused concern during her taxing years as department chair. ‘Through the first part of the 1940s,’ she commented later, ‘I ... was in miserable health and often thought I could not go on, but I had to.’49 But matters then began to improve. The house on Silver Street became a centre where both Viola and Miff entertained friends and students: ‘It was a grand house for entertaining. Both of us had huge parties because she dealt with a large gang and by this time I had brought [the] American culture [program] here ..., and I had great gangs. So we had so much space to entertain then; we had a whole lower floor opened up. It was just a happy time.’50 There were times, however, when the idea of more tranquility seemed attractive. In the spring of 1939 Viola and Miff considered buying a house, and looked at a large old property in South Hadley. Rejecting it as too expensive to keep up, they began instead to think about buying a lot on the fringe of town and building a more compact home. Viola, however, had long been tempted too by the possibility of buying a farm to be used in the summer and visited at other times of year. All of these

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plans were put on hold during the Second World War, and the idea of the farm was never seriously revived. To Merle Curti, who had his own farm in Vermont, Viola admitted wistfully in 1950, ‘I have often wished I had one, so as to have peace and quiet and solitude when one wants it.’51 In the meantime, there was the garden at Silver Street. One of the tributes at her memorial service recalled that, in addition to growing flowers and vegetables, she had reclaimed part of a field at the bottom of the garden to plant a lawn where she held dinner parties on warm evenings.52 As a gardener, she was nothing if not systematic. Her garden books were meticulously kept, especially during the years of her wartime Victory garden. Most of the entries recorded such seasonal matters as planting, transplanting, harvesting, and canning. Occasionally, her terse language hinted at more colourful events, as in late June 1943: 28 June 1943. Put up fence at east, because of dog in corn. Very hot, so did little work. 29 June 1943. We finished putting up the fence. Last lap I did alone because M. hit her ankle with hatchet.53

Summers, however, still caused most of whatever friction there was between Miff and Viola. Viola was always protective of her writing time. She also complained that while writing she could not stop the ideas revolving in her mind, which invariably resulted in disturbed sleep and in her ‘getting a bit tired nervously’ – and, no doubt, becoming hard to get along with.54 Miff was not the only one to bear the brunt of all this – one summer, it was a group of intrusive painters with whom Viola, by her own account, ‘raised hell’ – but she was the most usual one.55 After the latest argument on the subject in 1940, which had centred on Miff’s intention to return briefly from the shore to move some furniture to the third floor, Viola recalled previous altercations and predicted that Miff would bring her mother and stay on ‘as long as I would not throw a fit.’ As she had done before, Viola raised the possibility of one or other of them moving out. She did so in terms that reaffirmed the importance to her of their relationship but also betrayed her increasing anxiety that her book remained short of completion: I would find it extremely difficult to get along without you, for I love you dearly and your companionship means the most to me of anything on the emotional side of my life. But I know I have to face the issue professionally, for I know that it is increasingly bad for me to have the undercurrent of

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Outdoors, 1940s (Mount Holyoke College Archives and Special Collections)

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potential frustration which I get increasingly from the fear that I can never undertake anything any more and be sure I can do it well, because I can never be sure of the conditions under which I will have to work. The question of my August for research never stays settled. No matter how many rows we have, I always have to fight it again the following summer.56

The partnership between Viola and Miff would stay intact. Yet Viola had not had a major publication, book or article, since 1931. For her, it was an unusual and worrying gap. Merle Curti had described her in early 1938 as being, ‘of course, one of the four or five most distinguished American colonialists.’57 A defensible enough statement then, it was still not an extravagant one two years later. Yet the scholarly world of early America was changing. At the meetings of the American Historical Association in Washington in December 1939, Barnes (a member of the program committee) organized a session on the intellectual and cultural history of New England. One of the participants, the Harvard historian Perry Miller, visited Mount Holyoke a few weeks later to give a lecture and took the opportunity to tell her that he thought it had been the most successful session of the entire program.58 No doubt the congratulations were well deserved. Still, the reality was that Miller rather than Barnes represented the approaching wave of scholarship. Barnes had stood firmly for the view that the history of New England was more than the history of Puritanism. For her, Puritans represented one religious and political faction – albeit an extraordinarily powerful one – that could be juxtaposed with adherents of the Church of England and with political ‘moderates.’ The economic and political expansion of the seventeenthcentury English empire, she argued in The Dominion of New England and in other publications, provided opportunities for New Englanders whose motivations were secular and economic in character to assert their influence as merchants and office-holders. In 1939, Miller had published his seminal study The New England Mind: The Seventeenth Century. The book’s claims were carefully measured: it was, the foreword declared, ‘a topical analysis of various leading ideas in colonial New England [rather] than a history of their development.’ Nothing in it denied the existence of the economic and political currents that had underlain the New England careers of prominent figures such as Richard Wharton and Sir William Phips. However, for Miller, Puritanism was ‘one of the major expressions of the Western intellect,’ and ‘the most coherent and most powerful single factor in the early history of America.’59 Logically, it followed that the study of Puritanism – and, more

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generally, of intellectual as opposed to material values – would have a unique explanatory power. At the same time, the era of the ‘imperial school’ as a coherent historiographical force was waning. Charles McLean Andrews himself died in 1943. Four volumes of his Colonial Period of American History had been completed by 1938, when he succumbed to what would be an extended illness. He had written an article that was published after his death, as he had intended. It sketched out a plan for three further volumes, concluding with a characteristic statement: ‘Before we can grasp the significance of the critically important events that took place in America, particularly in New England, after 1770, it will be necessary to fathom more clearly the working of the English mind both at Whitehall and at Westminster.’60 This was the principle that underpinned Barnes’s almost-completed work. Yet, for increasing numbers of historians, it was the New England mind rather than the English mind that really mattered. None of this meant that Barnes or others of Andrews’s former pupils had suddenly become insignificant. Many of them continued to write and publish well into the period following the Second World War. The sense of being collectively at the innovative edge of the profession, however, was now in jeopardy. Andrews’s posthumous article was significant for another reason. Along with a sketch of his life and bibliography, it was the lead article of the first volume of the third series of the William and Mary Quarterly. In this issue, the journal made the transition from being a magazine devoted specifically to the history of Virginia to one dealing, as its new subtitle declared, with the entire scope of ‘early American history, institutions, and culture.’ It would be sponsored by the newly founded Institute of Early American History and Culture, the product of a pooling of resources between the College of William and Mary and Colonial Williamsburg.61 The only journal devoted specifically to this area of study, it would gain sufficiently in prestige to become central to the field’s postwar development – to an extent that would later cause Viola Barnes to regard it and those who edited it as pretentious arbiters of the validity of certain lines of research as opposed to others. In the meantime, research and writing continued to preoccupy much of Barnes’s time and energy. By 1940, her manuscript on British imperial expansion had gone into two volumes. According to her annual report in 1940, it was ‘practically ready for publication, awaiting subsidy.’62 For now, the textbook on colonial history became her main priority. It had been due for submission by the fall of 1939, but even six weeks of writing a chapter a week during the summer was not enough to bring it to

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completion. To her editor at W.W. Norton, she blamed her duties as department chair. The demands of conducting the hiring process without secretarial support, she said, had ‘nearly killed me off.’63 In the spring of 1940, Barnes travelled to New York to review the book’s progress. It was an amicable meeting, at which she agreed to keep the length within reasonable limits and to minor changes in the project. A more complex issue, however, was the book’s essential character. ‘My only bed-rock stand,’ she confirmed to her publisher, ‘would be on the general approach ... which is that it be the Andrews approach, treating the colonies as colonies of England and not the predestined United States. Being an Andrews disciple already classified professionally with the group which deals with the period that way, I could not depart from that approach.’64 For reasons related to this concern, the book was abandoned after almost five more years had passed and the manuscript was substantially complete. Barnes admitted that she had procrastinated, but believed also that she should never have accepted the contract in the first place. ‘It was my fault,’ she informed her editor, ‘for letting my need for subsidy for the research study influence me to accept the invitation.’ She had submitted only one chapter, and the final sticking point was criticism from the publisher on the grounds that her writing style lacked ‘flesh and blood’ and that her preoccupation with a specific thread of argument had precluded her from including interesting and necessary detail. While lamenting that she had ‘wasted so many years unnecessarily,’ she agreed readily to the contract’s termination. ‘My job is really research,’ she concluded, ‘without pictures.’65 Other publishers subsequently heard of, and expressed interest in, the textbook manuscript – but apparently none of them ever got to see it. In a later summary of her scholarly activity during the war, Barnes described the manuscript as ‘a general (not a textbook) book for advanced students and ... a popular book on [the] whole colonial period.’ It never reached the intended audience, or any audience at all.66 Barnes had also turned down other possible research projects. In 1940 she cited her commitments both to the textbook and to her study of imperial expansion in declining an invitation from Curtis P. Nettels of Cornell to write the first volume of a projected multi-volume economic history of the United States.67 A year later, it was an atlas to which Barnes would have contributed plates on the Virginia Company and the Council for New England. ‘I am swamped with college work and a contract book already over due,’ she responded, ‘but thank you for asking me.’68 In reality, within a little more than a year, Barnes had suspended

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work on the textbook and had been relieved of her departmental duties. Work on her main project continued, but within strict limits imposed by wartime constraints. The two volumes of the manuscript had already been worked over thoroughly, and any further revisions that depended on new research would have to be postponed until transatlantic travel could be resumed. During the summer of 1940, she had been involved briefly in efforts to salvage from Great Britain, by microfilming and copying, essential historical records dealing with colonial history. Characteristically, she was concerned not only with those relating to the Thirteen Colonies, but also with those series pertaining to the non-rebelling portions of the western hemisphere. ‘For any future study of the British Empire,’ she commented, ‘this material will be badly needed.’ She suggested concentrating on Bermuda and the Caribbean, and leaving the filming of the rest to the Public Archives of Canada.69 In the event, the relevant collections escaped serious damage during the bombing of London, but this did not solve Barnes’s problem of getting at them for her own research. It was 1949 by the time the major archival collections were accessible again and Barnes was able to find support from the Social Science Research Council for a summer in London. Her sojourn was preceded by a sabbatical leave during the winter, and she left for London in April. Although the main professed purpose of the visit was to check references and tie off loose ends of research, the reality was more complex. Barnes’s project had evolved in at least two major respects. First, she had decided to extend its chronological scope to 1783. The first volume would take the story from 1760 to 1773. Second, she had lost confidence in one of the key contributing arguments as she had earlier envisaged it. She was no longer convinced that the regulation of western territories was a crucial influence on British colonial policy or on the outbreak of the revolution, and now sought other ways of explaining the approaches taken by successive British ministries to the enlarged North American empire.70 These changes had made the project larger and more complex. They had also erased the elegant simplicity of the original design, in which the revolution had been peripheral to the question of imperial expansion. Barnes arrived in London with a first volume complete except for the checking of details. She also had a draft of a second volume going up to 1778, which had substantial interpretive issues still to be resolved. There were also unexpected difficulties of a more practical kind. Confusion over hotel reservations left her with nowhere to stay for the last three weeks in May. Taking an early vacation, she revisited Paris, Flo-

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rence, and Rome before getting back to work on June 1st at the Public Record Office. There and at the British Museum (and occasionally elsewhere) she worked continuously until the first week of September. Weekends were spent reviewing notes and planning new archival strategies. The summer was hot. Nights of broken sleep led sometimes to less productive days, and occasionally she also blamed the ‘protein-less diet’ of rationed food for the ‘languor’ that slowed her down.71 A more serious interruption came on 25 July, when she heard of the death of Miff’s mother.72 Overall, however, it was a period of intensive and generally productive work. Much of her time, after the checking of references for the first volume was completed, was spent on researching the influence on colonial policy of the English radicals of the 1760s and 1770s, chiefly John Wilkes, Catherine Macaulay, and Joseph Priestley. For Barnes, as she eventually integrated this research into what would become yet another volume of her study – the middle volume of three, covering the period from 1768 to 1772 – the question of the development of a revolutionary movement in the British nation on both sides of the Atlantic had to be seen as separate from the question of colonial independence. Only after 1772, when it became clear that radicalism lacked the necessary momentum to prompt a revolution in Great Britain itself, did the two issues converge. The colonial rebellion then became the final expression of the British revolutionary drive. Dramatic as it was, the rebellion could be seen as a remnant of the wider movement, given additional longevity by arguments over colonial taxation.73 Barnes returned to the United States exhausted in September 1949, and took a few days with Miff at the shore before the year opened at Mount Holyoke. By the time she settled down to draft her report to the Social Science Research Council, reflection on her work had turned to optimism. ‘I feel full to the brim with ideas,’ she wrote. Although her sabbatical was over, ‘I must manage to find time week-end for completion of my project.’74 Yet, while in the report she downplayed the structural changes to her study that would flow from her latest research, the reality was that it had now become more complicated than ever. There was no doubt of either the validity or the originality of the questions she was asking. At the age of sixty-four, however, her ability to answer them thoroughly and convincingly would inevitably depend on several more years of physical vigour and intellectual suppleness. In the meantime, there were troubling respects in which Barnes felt out of sorts with the postwar world. Outside of the archives, London had been a disappointment. Returning on the ocean liner Queen Mary, she

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wrote to Merle Curti that it had ‘lost its glamor in many ways.’ The food was boring, theatres still adhered to inconvenient wartime hours, the parks were burned up by the heat, and trains and hotels were crowded enough to make excursions outside London impractical.75 Although she did not say so to Curti, she suspected that at least some of these problems could be blamed on the socialism of the Attlee government. Some weeks after her return, she saw an article in the New York Times on allegations that the Truman administration was following the British example. Writing immediately to Homer E. Capehart, Republican senator from Indiana – who after making his fortune by popularizing the jukebox was now making a political career out of opposing interventionist social policies – Barnes denounced the British welfare state. High taxation and loss of the work ethic, she believed, were the inevitable results of the kind of social experiments the Labour government had launched. So was austerity and rationing: ‘government could not buy enough food, to keep people well, but it could afford a very expensive and wastefully administered program of socialized medicine.’ Hotels were overcrowded, she continued, because the government insisted on bringing ‘group after group of people from various European states’ to study the products of socialism. Americans were denied reservations, even though it was American aid that was ultimately paying the bills. ‘I think,’ Barnes concluded, ‘that if we want to save England from socialism, we should stop our loan to them. If we do it in time, it may save us too.’76 Thus far, Barnes had said nothing that had not been said repeatedly by the Attlee government’s domestic critics. However, there was more to her mistrust of Fabian socialism and its counterparts in the United States. Privately, she blamed the Fabians for the persistence of rationing, attributing it to their efforts to move the British diet towards vegetarianism.77 Irritating as she found postwar England, it was covert socialism that she regarded as the real danger – and she believed it to be just as insidious in the United States. Mistrust of socialism was nothing new for Barnes, as her radio broadcasts in the mid-1930s had shown. As chair of her department, she had also expressed caution about hiring historians who were ‘too red.’78 But her concern intensified in the late 1940s. In early 1949, she wrote to the radio commentator Fulton Lewis, Jr, to complain about the ‘attempt to capture the younger generation and condition them for future citizenship in a socialistic society’ that she believed to be under way in the universities and endorsed by the Truman administration. While political scientists, in her view, had to shoulder much of the blame, she also considered the writing of United States history to be vul-

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nerable to the efforts of such exponents of ‘crusade history’ as Allan Nevins. In the guise of citizenship education, academic values would be subverted by slanted curricula, and academic freedom abused by professors who abandoned impartiality in favour of ‘preaching their extreme gospels.’79 Fulton Lewis was among the most prominent anti-Communist broadcasters of the early Cold War era, and he quickly rewarded Barnes with an appreciative note. She had been ‘extremely helpful,’ he said, to his efforts to build up a file on ‘Communist influences in our institutions of learning.’80 This, of course, was not exactly what she had said, although as McCarthyite rhetoric intensified such fine distinctions could easily be overlooked. Barnes, it seems, could never quite bring herself to correct Lewis’s ‘very nice letter.’ After listening to another of his broadcasts in 1951, she drafted out a further letter explaining that ‘there are communists, of course, and they too are dangerous, but I do not believe they make the decisions.’ The real danger came from the architects of Truman’s ‘Fair Deal’ and of the United Nations, such as Dean Acheson, and supportive historians such as Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. ‘These men,’ Barnes believed, ‘think the millennium has come.’81 But the letter seems never to have been sent. Perhaps she feared that it might be misunderstood. Viola Barnes’s apprehensions about ‘crusade history’ and its relationship to socialism would prove resistant to the passage of time. Yet, even in the increasingly perplexing post-war era, her own teaching of history remained satisfying both to herself and, it seems, to her students. She was especially proud of the interdisciplinary program on American culture. Not surprisingly, she was also intensely protective of it. ‘The unity of American history,’ she remarked in 1940, ‘has for many years been my chief interest, and I have had to work toward it against considerable disapproval.’82 Three years later she achieved the not inconsiderable feat of extracting a written apology from an academic committee that had sought without her approval to downplay the interdisciplinary nature of the program in the college catalogue.83 And her final major battle at Mount Holyoke was waged, unsuccessfully, in 1949 to have her firstyear course in American civilization recognized among the ‘basic courses’ in the college curriculum.84 Outside of the collegiate politics of more than a decade as chair of the American culture program, Viola Barnes’s teaching took a mature form that was unusual for its time. Her introductory course and her course on Latin America remained conventional lecture courses. Her other intermediate and advanced courses were based largely on guided reading of

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selected printed primary and secondary sources, discussion, and class presentations. Groups were restricted to twelve students, with the intermediate courses divided into up to four sections with different material to read. Students were constantly presented with questions. Sometimes they betrayed Barnes’s own interpretive views, notably in her course on colonial history, but they were always provocative. ‘Do you think the Puritans had the right to put their will over the rest of the colony in Massachusetts and New Haven?’ ‘Why was New Netherland granted to the Duke of York?’ ‘Was England justified in forcing Massachusetts to recognize the Navigation laws and toleration, and in taking away the charter when Massachusetts refused?’ ‘Did parliament have legal authority over the colonies, or did it usurp it?’ ‘What do you think of the theory of the buffer colony as tried out with Georgia and Nova Scotia?’ After the students had grappled with all of these and more, they could take a whole semester’s course on ‘Attempts to Stem the Tide of Revolution, 1774–1783.’ Here the focus was not on explaining the success of the rebellion per se, but instead on standing the question on its head by exploring why a range of efforts to end it, whether through repression or conciliation, did not succeed.85 In courses on the United States in the nineteenth century, meanwhile, Barnes focused on social and cultural topics, and introduced her classes to women’s history. Among her regrets on having missed the Women’s Centennial Congress in 1940 was that she would have wished to report on it to her class, which was working at the time on changes in women’s societal roles.86 To a correspondent a decade later, Barnes commented that ‘the students are always interested in ... topics on women educators, women crusaders, etc.,’ and she was hopeful that Mount Holyoke could develop a library centre for the study of ‘career women.’87 As Barnes implied, the focus was on prominent women, rather than on workingclass women or women of colour, but the interest aroused was selfevident. After Barnes had directed a master’s thesis in 1940 on ‘Women Leaders in Early Nineteenth Century America,’ the library’s copy was ‘after a few years ... worn to tatters.’88 Women’s history, for Barnes, was just one element of the history of the United States, even though it was an important element and one that mattered both to her and to the women she taught. Unlike her slightly older contemporary Mary Beard, Barnes did not see in the promotion of women’s history the key to challenging the male hierarchy of the discipline. Rather, for that purpose, she put her faith in actions furthering the specific interests of women historians, especially through the Berkshire Conference.89

Teaching a class in United States history, 1949 (Mount Holyoke College Archives and Special Collections)

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When she did teach women’s history, the emphasis on ‘career women’ was revealing. As Viola Barnes had made her own way in spite of the obstacles thrown up by gender and social class, she had become impatient with what she saw as the special pleading of those who lacked the determination to do likewise. They ranged from the nineteenth-century ‘schoolma’am’ about whom she had written caustically in 1930 to the proponents of socialist causes in the post-war era. At the same time, she cared passionately about young women who had the necessary qualities for self-advancement but also needed the knowledge and analysis that history could provide. By so equipping them, and likewise by her approach to the hiring of faculty women, she showed once again her commitment to a form of liberal feminism that was directly related to her own experience of the power of separate women’s organizations to prepare young women for individual success in spite of the subtlest or the crudest of barriers they might have to surmount. Barnes’s approach to teaching was new to many of the students who enrolled for the first time in her classes, and at first they were often hesitant. Only after Barnes had insisted on critical discussion, and had demonstrated her own willingness to tolerate arguments of every kind as long as they were properly supported, would the class take on a life of its own. Barnes later summarized what would happen next: I put the emphasis ... on supported interpretations of the students themselves who each had, twice a semester, a topic to investigate and half the time of a weekly evening session in presenting the chief ideas of it and directing the discussion of the class members who would have read on both of the two topics of the evening in order to have some substance to their discussion. I acted as traffic cop, but after the first few sessions, did little interfering unless somebody got mad or unless they leaned on their emotions for their interpretations. I know they liked this method, for when the evening session closed at 9.45 by order of the librarian, they would retreat to the College Inn across the street and discuss until put out [of] there, or at least until the soft drinks and chips ran out. They would often invite me, but I would usually refuse because I thought their discussions would sooner develop maturity and intellectual individuality without me.90

Typically, there would be no tests or written final examination. Instead, on the assigned day for the final examination in any given course or section, five hours would be set aside, usually from 8.00 a.m. to 1.00 p.m. For two hours the students would take turns in leading a twenty-minute

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discussion on a pre-approved topic. At 10.00, ‘cooperating friends’ would drive them from the campus to the house on Silver Street for coffee and doughnuts. Then another two-hour session would go from 11.00. According to Barnes’s recollection, the only real difficulty came in halting the discussions at 1.00. Evaluation itself was less problematic: ‘I asked them each, at the end, to send me a list of the grades they would give if they were teacher, but not to sign their own names. I rarely had to disagree with their rating.’91 The students in turn appeared to have rated Barnes’s teaching highly. Although those who wrote when she eventually retired in 1952 were by definition a self-selected group, they were numerous and their comments were often made in the belief that they spoke for more than just themselves. ‘You always seemed to be learning all over again, right along with us,’ commented one former student. ‘Your interests became our interests; your fervor became our fervor.’92 ‘You always seemed to make us reach for perfection,’ wrote another, ‘all the while understanding our weaknesses. Because you put so much of your heart into your students, I, who felt all too inadequate, found myself trying so hard to do my best for you.’93 Even fifty and sixty years after graduation, recollections were clear and specific. A member of the class of 1940 had ‘especially enjoyed the final exams’ (a tribute few courses can have earned then or later) and the ‘lively learning exchange’ they provided.94 For a graduate of 1949, Barnes’s physical appearance stayed in the memory: ‘she had reddish brown hair, fair skin, and a little nose which was very sensitive to cold.’ So too did one of her favourite phrases, used to encourage detailed and critical interrogation of the sources. ‘Suck the orange dry,’ she repeatedly urged.95 Perhaps there were other students who were less enthusiastic. Even so, and whatever the difficulty of evaluating classroom interactions years after the event, the impression is strong that whatever stresses were troubling Viola Barnes at any given time – and during the 1940s there was no shortage – they did not follow her into the classroom. In January 1939, Viola Barnes had entered what she hoped would be a new and productive phase of her career, at last in a position to put right the long-standing deficiencies she perceived in the history that was taught at Mount Holyoke. Already a recognized scholar with a twovolume manuscript in hand that promised to extend both her range and her reputation, she prepared to invest her mature years also in building up the strength of her department. She envisaged a department composed of able scholars, most of them female and most of them in fields other than medieval history. In her own estimation, she failed – though

With students, ca. 1951 (Mount Holyoke College Archives and Special Collections)

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not necessarily, again in her estimation, through any fault of her own. Although the early 1940s brought honours, they were also alloyed with regrets. As the war years wore on, she found rewards where she had found them before – with Miff, with students and friends. Otherwise, she found much to blame in others. Her family offered little that she recognized as worthwhile. Her colleagues refused to see the wisdom of actions she proposed. Socialism threatened. Moreover, her research efforts – which, as always, expressed and embodied much of her creative self – were narrowed down to her one major manuscript, at the same time as its ever-growing complexity seemed to keep completion tantalizingly out of reach. For many years, Barnes’s life had depended on a balance. Friendship, teaching, scholarship were on one side. Family and departmental conflict, along with intermittently poor health and her own jaundiced view of those she disliked on reasoned or prejudiced grounds, weighed on the other. By 1950, the prospect of retirement made for uncertainties in the balance. The possibility also existed that research and scholarship might shift from one side of the scales to the other.

CH APTE R 5

‘There is not too much time left’: Retirement, 1950–1960

In late December 1958, Viola Barnes wrote to a niece that she was working long hours, seven days a week, on her manuscript. ‘At 73,’ she explained, ‘there is not too much time left.’1 Barnes had retired from Mount Holyoke in 1952, although she continued to live in South Hadley. Her retirement came at a difficult time for women historians, as access to the profession had become increasingly a male preserve during the postwar years. Barnes regretted this development as she participated in the search for her successor and found female candidates in short supply. During the later 1950s, she was increasingly suspicious of male insurgency in professional organizations and in less-formal scholarly networks. Towards the end of the decade these misgivings, which had a perfectly rational basis, were becoming melded with less-plausible apprehensions of unfair appraisals of the value of her own work. When she finally sent the first volume to be considered by Yale University Press, she received a non-committal response that she interpreted as a rejection. By 1960 she was becoming convinced that a cabal existed within the highest ranks of the profession that was determined to prevent the publication of books such as hers. At the same time, her longstanding fear of plagiarism, which again had begun with every justification, began to reassert itself. The result was a volatile mixture of doubts and anxieties. Despite a stable domestic life in association with Mildred Howard, Barnes’s preoccupation with her manuscript became an increasing source of anxiety for herself and others. Even though she was now retired, the 1950s represented a pivotal decade in her long professional life, and one in which her experience became all the more clearly a gendered one. Her own personal frailties played a major role in the difficulties she encountered. Yet the way in which they did so was crucially

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influenced by the circumstances of a time when women historians – as well as ‘imperial school’ historians – were being forced into retreat. Normal retirement for Barnes would have come in 1951. When Frederick Cramer wrote as department chair in the spring of 1950 to inform her that it was the unanimous wish of her colleagues and President Ham that she retire on schedule, she raised no objection. With her concurrence, they had also agreed that her replacement should be a specialist in United States history, at a senior rank if the right candidate could be found. Cramer asked her to look around for possibilities during the summer of 1950.2 Her plans changed, however, with alterations in Social Security legislation by congressional vote that August. With an increased pension available to those who stayed on an additional year, Mount Holyoke (along with many other institutions) offered retirees this option. Barnes decided to take it, even though the condition was that her salary be cut from $6000 to $3600 for the year with no reduction in teaching duties.3 She eventually retired on 1 July 1952, with the rank of Professor Emeritus.4 The history department’s annual report for 1951–2 commented politely on the difficulties involved in finding a worthy successor to Barnes in view of her ‘considerable and deserved reputation.’5 Her own view was that matters had been complicated by gender-related tensions within the department, with its three male and three female members. The women, along with the recently appointed academic dean – the Asianist historian Meribeth Cameron – pressed for two women to be appointed, as a reflection of the proliferation of enrolments in United States history. One would be at a senior level, one junior. While President Ham did concede the two appointments, Barnes suspected him of colluding with the men in the department to fill at least one of them with a male. ‘If tactics force us to take a man,’ she reflected, ‘it must be somebody who respects professional women and can work with them.’6 Ultimately, a female candidate did accept the proffered associate professorship. An Americanist and a women’s historian to boot, Mary Sumner Benson had been a student of Evarts Greene at Columbia. Her major study of eighteenth-century American women, drawn from her doctoral thesis, had been published in 1935. The quid pro quo was the appointment of a young male scholar at the level of instructor.7 As Barnes confided regularly to Merle Curti, the search reflected wider trends within the profession. In some respects, the postwar era saw a diversification of access to the ranks of academic historians. Anti-Semitic barriers were weakened and the social origins of young

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historians broadened. At the same time, the proportion of women ‘fell precipitously.’8 As in other academic and professional fields, the return of male veterans from the Second World War exerted a critical influence. Not all of those who qualified for educational benefits under the GI Bill were male. Some 400,000 women were also eligible. However, the numbers of those women who pursued their entitlements were overshadowed by the unexpectedly massive response of the 7.8 million men who enrolled in higher education.9 The results for women were multifaceted and staggered over time. Immediately, women were even more outnumbered than before on coeducational campuses. At many institutions, as administrators struggled to deal with the influx of veterans, and with a strong current of public opinion that insisted on a liberal application of admission standards for veteran applicants, quotas and restrictions on women’s admission began to appear. Protests by the American Association of University Women were unavailing. At the same time, women administrators and faculty members – including, but not limited to, those who had been recruited as wartime replacements – faced pressure to resign or accept lesser positions in favour of males returning from the service.10 In addition, the financial well-being of women’s colleges was being endangered by their virtual exclusion from the revenue benefits of veteran enrolment and the institutional expansion it brought.11 The result of these short-term trends was not only to reduce the number of young women who were likely to qualify as historians or other academics, but also to create an expectation of discrimination that prompted already-qualified women to seek less prestigious forms of employment – or to choose unpaid domestic labour. For academic women, this brought a double bind. Reluctantly, Viola Barnes had scant comfort for a younger colleague in 1951: Academic jobs are very, very scarce, and have been for some time. We have tried for years to help Elizabeth [sic, for Elisabeth] Kimball, a Ph.D. from Yale, also one of our A.B.’s and A.M.’s with a B.Litt. from Oxford, to get back into circulation after an adventure into deaning. So far she has had only substitute jobs. And there are others, women of some distinction like Evelyn Acord [sic, for Acomb] who got into war work and then tried unsuccessfully ... to get back into college work. And Beatrice Reynolds, who stopped to care for an ailing mother. All of these are good research scholars who have had teaching experience of some time. There are others like Mrs. Constance Green who had a Yale Ph.D. after bringing up a family,

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but she has not been able to get ... [employment], and so has gone into government work.12

However, as Barnes lamented to Curti in the same year, the flow of discouraged women out of the profession also meant that, for any given search, qualified female candidates might well be hard to find: ‘Merle, I wish there was a good woman candidate in the upper brackets. What has happened to the women?’13 By 1951 too, additional pressures were becoming evident. One of them proved to be short lived, although it was necessarily taken seriously at the time. The prolongation of the Korean War raised fears of wartime austerity that prompted some institutions – Mount Holyoke for one – to contemplate reducing the number of faculty positions. There also seemed no prospect that women’s colleges would be able to raise their uncompetitive salaries.14 Another pressure stemmed from the longer-term implications of the veteran influx. The proportion of veterans who chose to pursue advanced studies in history was very small in relation to the millions of veteran students. In relation to the existing population of academic historians, however, the number was substantial. Viola Barnes, who found it difficult to understand why so many of them apparently wanted a job at Mount Holyoke, took a jaundiced view: If we can swing the woman appointment for the upper post, then we will immediately turn to reviewing the multitude of the inexperienced. Never have I seen the market so glutted with them. They are mostly men with a GI education on the bill of rights, and have serenely married and have one or two children. They leap at us from behind every pillar, and tell us they will take anything, not caring at all about rank etc., but when we tell them our instructor salaries, they look hurt and mention a salary that is more than Miss Pugh ... gets as an assistant professor after around 12 years experience. Also, they expect a benign college to provide a place to live, which it cannot unless a college house happens to turn up vacant.15

In Barnes’s disdain for the young male historians of the early 1950s there was a hint of snobbery directed at those whose only realistic aspiration to higher education had depended on the GI Bill. In the same letter to Curti, she compounded it by a snippy comparison of Mount Holyoke salaries with the money, car, and clothes supposedly enjoyed by her milkman.16 Yet even in this, she touched – in a backhanded way – on

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a central element of the collective predicament of women historians of the decade. For a generation of male historians, military service had occupied a formative period of young adulthood. As Michael McGiffert noted in 1995, introducing a series of ten memoirs by recently retired historians of early America, ‘Eight of the ... writers served in the military – seven in World War II, one in the Korean War. Most recall their wartime experience as both interrupting and advancing their education (through the G.I. Bill) and also influencing their choice of career.’17 The 1995 collection of memoirs was the third compiled by the William and Mary Quarterly. Together with others in 1988 and 1984, the total number of ‘Early American Emeriti’ memoirs came to twenty-eight. All the historians were male. Some had spent their careers largely outside of the United States, some had begun before the Second World War, and one (the Korean War veteran) had begun some fifteen years after it ended.18 Of the nineteen whose careers had been in the United States and who had started during the immediate post–Second World War era, fourteen made specific mention of their wartime military service. For some, wartime experience itself had been decisive in their choice of a subsequent career. In David S. Lovejoy, although there was ‘no sudden revelation on a beachhead,’ overseas service created ‘an irresistible urge to put my mind onto issues and materials I could think about for the rest of my life.’19 For George Athan Billias, it was his presence at the liberation of a Nazi concentration camp that crucially intensified a desire ‘to study the causes of war and man’s inhumanity to man.’ He commented too on the high proportion of his later colleagues at Clark University who related their motivations to war – ‘[W]ars do seem to breed historians.’20 Jackson Turner Main’s four years as an enlisted man convinced him that ‘many members of a supposedly elite class deserved no more admiration than their presumed inferiors, for all that one was required to salute and obey them.’ As a postwar graduate student at the University of Wisconsin, Main found this belief to be confirmed by a pervasive sense in the department of history ‘that only major reforms would preserve the military victory.’21 For others, it was the GI Bill that provided opportunity and kindled their sense of participation in an invigorating social experiment. ‘Men who served as comrades in arms acquired mutual respect,’ commented Francis Jennings, ‘and the postwar GI Bill changed the class structure of the historical profession by a massive infusion of veterans who could not have afforded the expensive training for a doctorate without the bill’s subsidy.’22 Of the fourteen ‘Emeriti’ who mentioned Second World War military service, ten identified themselves also as beneficia-

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ries of the GI Bill. For Malcolm Freiberg, representing the mood of them all, it was ‘a godsend.’23 The belief in a better and more socially inclusive postwar world, and in the discipline of history as one of its prime contributors, was perhaps more altruistic in its own way than an earlier historical generation’s ‘noble dream’ of objectivity.24 But it also had a strongly male complexion. When combined with the sharp decline in the long-standing proportions of women – from some 20 per cent of historians and new doctorates to not much more than half of that by the early 1960s25 – it was a recipe not just for a male-dominated profession, but also for a profession whose members, on any rare occasions of collective selfanalysis, would find a strong and confident moral justification to offset any misgivings based on gender grounds. In Viola Barnes, postwar trends inspired mistrust on a number of levels. Deeply suspicious of historians pressing the Truman administration leftwards in social policy (even though, presumably, she had no objection to augmentation of Social Security programs), she was also on guard against any tendency for postwar idealism to compromise the legacy of historical objectivity that she believed to have been bequeathed by, among others, Charles McLean Andrews. Even efforts to promote the teaching of American history in schools and colleges – a cause of her own in earlier years – aroused her scepticism. Merle Curti had been critical of Allan Nevins on this issue since the early 1940s, fearing that the movement would become chauvinistic. Barnes’s perspective was rather different. For her, writing in 1951, American history was being co-opted as ‘a propaganda subject by so-called liberals in the colleges who feel as many of them have said publicly, that American history should preach the new crusades.’26 At the same time, historiographical developments in New England history were moving against the thrust of Barnes’s earlier work. In 1948, Perry Miller had launched a scathing public attack on Curti as an intellectual historian, on the ground that he was oblivious to the autonomy of ideas. 27 While Barnes was not an intellectual historian, the opposing notion that ideas must be understood in their political and socio-economic contexts had always been integral to her approach. All of these preoccupations would grow in significance as Barnes’s own thinking developed during the 1950s. Her involvement in the search for her replacement, however, ensured that it was the gender dimensions of postwar changes that weighed heavily on her mind in the early years of the decade. Even though retirement insulated her from the

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immediate pressures faced by women historians in their institutions – or in their lack of a home institution – Barnes continued to be active in the Berkshire Conference. She recalled in 1956 that, other than during her sojourns in London in 1931 and 1949, she had never missed a spring meeting. She also regularly attended the breakfasts held at the American Historical Society meetings each December, and related committee meetings.28 Unexpectedly, she was again the Berkshire group’s president from late 1956 to the spring of 1957. Following the death of the incumbent, Judith Blow Williams, Barnes received a written approach from fourteen members of a self-styled ‘Berkshire old Guard.’29 She accepted, and served out an uncomfortable term during which she came in conflict with the organization’s secretary over the arrangements for the spring meeting, and then with rival groups at the meeting itself over the questions of expanding the membership and structuring the business session more formally. How much was due to Barnes’s own management style, and how much to the growing pains of the organization, is unclear. Barnes reflected more philosophically in 1958 that the Berkshire group’s numbers were finally beginning to show signs of recovery from ‘the depression of the 30s and the war decade which took so many women into other jobs,’ and by 1960 she had regained her customarily optimistic outlook on the group. Caroline Robbins, she reported to the absent Mildred Campbell, ‘made a fine president.’ For all that, Barnes had found the spring 1957 meeting to be ‘one of the most disillusioning experiences I ever had.’30 Two years before, however, a session of a quite different organization had been disturbing in its own way. In April 1955, Lawrence Gipson of Lehigh University had invited a large group of early Americanists to meet in New York to consider the foundation of a new national association in the field. The sixty or so participants assembled on the appointed Saturday morning at the Columbia University Faculty Club, gathering in the lounge before lunch and the formal sessions. According to Barnes’s recollection, it was the senior Columbia historian Richard B. Morris who pointed out that the lounge was open only to men and indicated that the women members must go elsewhere: We thought he was joking, but upon his insistence, someone asked where we could go. He said he did not know, but we must leave. I had been asked by Mr. Gipson ... to help with the place cards for the luncheon upstairs and so I took them all up with me, storming and angry and incredulous. We had quite a wait. Women apparently were not to be tolerated in the new order

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... Most of the women were women of some distinction, either as scholars, or administrators.31

Barnes added: ‘We all felt we had never been quite so insulted.’ Considering that the arbitrary exclusion of women from events held in menonly spaces was all too common during the 1950s, this was a strong statement.32 Even so, Barnes did agree to take the minutes – an impeccably feminine role – at the after-lunch business meeting. When it came to the election of a planning committee for the proposed society, the initial slate of nominees was all-male – although Caroline Robbins was eventually added in place of a nominee who withdrew. The society had a short active life. By September, the American Historical Review reported, the planning committee had folded its communications into the newsletter of the Institute for Early American History and Culture. Indeed, Gipson left Barnes with the impression that the whole exercise may have been intended ‘to get us all behind the Williamsberg [sic] Institute which was hard-pressed financially.’33 In gender terms, however, the affair was chiefly significant because it provided graphic evidence of why the Berkshire Conference remained essential for women historians. Barnes did have the advantage of a personal life that had adjusted smoothly to the new circumstances of retirement. Even though she remained active in professional activities, and spent countless hours on her writing, in some respects there was a new beginning. She had time to spend at Miff’s family cottage on the Connecticut shore.34 There was time also, from the summer of 1952, to put finishing touches to a new house and garden. After years on Silver Street, Viola and Miff began in late 1951 to give serious consideration to moving. They decided on separate, but closely adjoining houses in a newly developed area. The houses were constructed by the same builder on the same contract. Spanning three lots, they allowed ample space for lawns and gardens.35 When the two moved in, they divided up their joint possessions as best they could. But it was not a separation. For the rest of Viola’s life, their houses were more like complementary buildings on a single estate than distinct properties. Household items moved freely between the houses. Even sixteen years later, when Viola wrote to her brother Don about the provisions of her will, she commented that many of her possessions had been bought in common during the years on Silver Street: ‘We often have a hard time remembering whose they are. We tried to divide valuable table and other things when we came here, but we borrow back and forth when things are needed. These should all go to Mildred.’36 When it came to battles

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Viola Barnes and Mildred Howard (Mount Holyoke College Archives and Special Collections)

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with rabbits and woodchucks, or neighbouring dogs and their owners, to challenge Miff was to challenge Viola and vice versa. When frictions with neighbours arose in 1956, Viola lamented that four years earlier she and Miff had decided against a plan to run a line of poplar trees around their properties. This would have safeguarded the ‘desired seclusion’ of their shared domain.37 Retirement also seemed to deal kindly with Viola’s health. During her final teaching year, she complained again of digestive problems and headaches.38 From then on, the 1950s proceeded without serious difficulties. In 1960 she complained of being slowed down in her work for several weeks of the winter and spring by ‘an infection of some sort.’39 More dangerous was an accident in July. Plans for a week in the Adirondacks with Miff had to be cancelled abruptly when a dentist somehow allowed a sharp dental instrument to slip down Viola’s throat. It lodged eventually in her appendix, and in September she underwent surgery to remove it. The episode had a happy ending, as friends rallied round. ‘I think the fantastic character of the accident,’ she wrote to her brother Don, ‘tended to spread the news and with it a wave of sympathy tied up with the idea, why did it have to happen to a person of my age?’ As for the dentist, Barnes pursued him doggedly through the courts and eventually won a financial settlement.40 With remaining Nebraska relatives, meanwhile, there was reconciliation. Viola began in the late 1950s to write to her brother Frank, who was now in his eighties and in uncertain health. Her tone was gentle and reminiscent. His letters in return, she said, reminded her of those she used to receive from their mother: ‘[it] is like hearing from her as well as you.’41 It may have been a reflection of this rediscovery that in May 1959 she formally instructed her executor that she wished to be buried in the Rosehill Cemetery in Albion.42 With Don, however, matters were much more brittle. Now a senior professor of long standing at Western Reserve University – he would eventually retire in 1962, at the age of seventy – Don had published his second book in 1939, a study of the relationship between George III and the younger William Pitt.43 It was also his final one, although both would later be republished in second editions. Following the death of his wife, he travelled regularly to South Hadley, including annual visits at least from 1948 to 1953.44 From Don’s perspective, the visits were increasingly marred by Viola’s tendency to talk at length about her research, and her lack of any reciprocal interest in his own current work on the career of Charles, Lord Cornwallis. One of her harangues, he complained, had lasted a continuous seventy-eight minutes. ‘A pin prick

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is sufficient,’ he informed her in 1955, ‘to set you off like a Texas oil strike.’45 Don, however, had foibles of his own. In particular, he was not above doing some discreet boasting and some not-so-discreet namedropping. In early 1941, for example, he wrote to Viola that the eminent British historian Lewis Namier had reportedly praised his latest work fulsomely and had written him ‘a most flattering personal letter.’ The veneer of modesty with which he reported this news was unconvincing. A year later, R.H. Tawney – author of the much-reprinted Religion and the Rise of Capitalism – visited Western Reserve, and Don regaled Viola glowingly with the story of how successfully he had entertained the great scholar and his wife.46 In effect, an insidious element of professional rivalry had entered into their relationship, emerging in the 1940s and becoming more urgent and damaging in the 1950s. Viola became convinced by 1955 that Don had ambitions to shift his work to the area of British policy towards the American Revolution, using Cornwallis as a springboard and then appropriating the ideas she had expounded to him. Don was incredulous. ‘I am not interested in the American Revolution,’ he declared: ‘I never have been, and never expect to be.’ His letter concluded bitterly: ‘I have had enough of your half-insane tantrums. If you outlive me you can have my property, but no more of my time.’ He would not, he said, write to her again. Viola, in turn, saved the letter in its envelope, which she endorsed, ‘This is the most unbelievable letter I have ever received. He can’t be normal.’47 Who was ‘normal,’ and who was not, is difficult to say decades later. Viola’s propensities to monopolize conversations and to suspect others of unethical conduct were certainly characteristics that received independent and repeated confirmations in the later stages of her life. What the episode undoubtedly marked was the entry of her long and close relationship with Don into a new, unstable phase. For now, the completion of her manuscript was a matter of overriding concern. She worked at it furiously – checking, correcting, extending, retrenching, rewriting. To one visitor to her house in 1956 she apologized, not altogether convincingly, for the unenthusiastic welcome she had offered: ‘I am working against time on my book and no one gets in unless I think they saw or heard me.’48 To an old Nebraska friend in 1958 she enumerated the fellowships and other grants that had supported her research and now provided her with a sense of obligation to continue her work. ‘I retired in 1952 from teaching,’ she explained, ‘but seem to work harder than ever, seven days a week, trying to complete these studies which have been so generously subsidized, while I am still

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able. I am very happy doing this, and think it is the best and most interesting part of my life.’49 More difficult, however, was the task of finding the right publisher. In late 1954, she angrily refused an offer from Don to make her a gift of $5000 towards a publication subsidy and at the same time introduce her to the New York publisher Alfred A. Knopf. His concern, he later explained, was that her perfectionism would cause her to be scooped by younger scholars. Notwithstanding, Viola made her own approach to Knopf in early 1955, without success.50 By the following year she had sought and received a small grant from the Social Science Research Council for retyping of the first volume, intending to submit it for publication while she reworked the second.51 Soon afterwards she approached Yale University Press, and received an encouraging reply. Still she hesitated and continued to revise the second volume. Finally, in March 1959 she decided to submit the manuscript of volume 1. It was apparently at this point that she decided that the work would eventually run to three volumes. ‘I hope you will like these studies,’ she commented to Henry A. Moe of the Guggenheim Foundation: ‘I know that I have an interpretation which no one has yet touched.’52 For Yale, though, she had a more cautious message. On several past occasions, she said, she had been the victim of appropriation of her research by others. For that reason, she was concerned about who might read the manuscript while it was in the process of being considered. Nevertheless, in April 1959 she travelled to Yale and delivered it personally.53 The first volume of the manuscript was dedicated to her father. The second she planned to dedicate to Charles McLean Andrews.54 In content, they were substantially changed from the single-volume text that had existed prior to the Second World War. The eventual trilogy carried the general title ‘Britain in the Shadow of World Revolution, 1760– 1776.’ The most complete version that survives is undated, but apparently belongs no earlier than to the late 1960s.55 Volume 1 carries an acknowledgment to the college librarian Anne Carey Edmonds, who was appointed in 1964; volume 2 carries pencil notes that have a variety of dates going up to 1969; and volume 3’s contents page is clearly dated 13 April 1969. By that time Barnes was approaching eighty-four years of age, although she was still drafting new passages more than seven years later.56 Given her constant reworking during the 1950s and 1960s, it is difficult to define the exact shape of the manuscript at any given time. However, the relative sparsity of pencil alterations in the text of the first volume suggests that its surviving form is close to what was submitted to

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Yale in 1959. The volume covered the years from 1760 to 1768. It argued that George III, partly through the early influence of Lord Bute, came to the throne determined to create a new form of monarchy characterized by Enlightenment rationality – although preserved from the authoritarianism characteristic of, say, the Prussian monarchy by the traditional constraints of the Constitution. Whether as a patron of the arts, as the protector of a persecuted philosopher such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau, or simply as the benevolent head of the British nation on both sides of the Atlantic, the king sought to oversee the transition to a rational system of governance from the corruption of the old party system. Partly because of the inherent threat of these plans to existing political balances, and partly because the king himself was drawn inexorably into the political manoeuvrings he regarded as corrupt in others, Barnes argued, opposition was drawn forth from two directions: from Whig aristocrats threatened by reform and from radicals who saw in the royal ambitions a danger to traditional liberties and their future extension. Within the British polity as it existed in the British Isles themselves, the result was an alliance between aristocratic interests led by Richard Grenville, Earl Temple, and radicals of the stripe of John Wilkes and Joseph Priestley. Within the British polity in North America, a similar radicalism quickly made itself felt, but took on a life of its own during the controversies following the Stamp Act of 1765. Barnes attributed the revenue measures of this era not just to the stresses of an overextended empire (which had been her position in the pre-war version) but also to a deliberate royal effort to harmonize the rights and responsibilities of subjects throughout the transatlantic British nation. The practical result, however, was to entrench in the colonies a revolutionary radicalism – represented conspicuously by such activists as Benjamin Franklin and John Adams – that the repeal of the Stamp Act in 1766 failed entirely to douse. This was especially true, Barnes believed conventionally enough, because of the repeal’s accompaniment by the uncompromising assertion of parliamentary authority in the Declaratory Act. At this point in her the argument, the expense of administering the western territories did assume a role. For Barnes, by 1768, there was not only a deep ideological divide at the heart of the British political system, but also unsettled issues over revenue and western administration that virtually guaranteed that the ideological difference would be rekindled in the form of active political dispute.57 Barnes’s manuscript was long and sprawling – though not to the same degree as the following two volumes. The preoccupation with detail was

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at times self-indulgent. Her insistence that Rousseauist ideas were heavily influential in the mid-1760s both on George III and on his minister George Grenville could aptly be described as quixotic. On more specific historiographical grounds, the manuscript was not difficult to criticize. On the British side, the most obvious omission was any serious consideration of the work of Namier. Not for Barnes, even at second hand, the painstaking analysis of parliamentary patterns that Namier had pioneered during the interwar years. His seminal study The Status of Politics at the Accession of George III (1929) had been closely followed by England in the Age of the American Revolution (1930), and second editions of the two books were published in 1957 and 1961 respectively.58 While Namier’s politicians went calmly about the business of safeguarding the local interests of their constituents, some of them also enjoying the prestige of influential family connections and steadily building up expertise on larger matters of state, Barnes’s stepped edgily across the crevasses of Rousseauist despotism and democratic radicalism – fretting all the while about how to relate these ideological cross-currents to the pressing questions of empire and taxation. While Namier’s George III ‘never left the safe ground of Parliamentary government, and merely acted the primus inter pares, the first among the borough-mongering, electioneering gentlemen of England,’ Barnes’s monarch pressed forward – bravely if not always wisely – towards a new form of kingship.59 Amidst a generation of British historians accustomed to think in terms of a ‘Namierite revolution’ in approaches to eighteenth-century political history, Barnes would have faced an uphill task even in gaining a polite hearing, and her lack of so much as the slightest historiographical engagement with Namier’s work was a glaring gap in her study. On the other side of the Atlantic, Barnes’s work simply did not fit into any of the recognized categories of revolutionary studies. For Progressives, neo-Progressives, counter-Progressives, neo-Whigs, and members of the other herds that grazed back and forth across the rich savannah lands of revolutionary historiography, it would have been difficult to envisage Barnes as sharing the same landscape. Progressive historians of the early decades of the twentieth century, notably the otherwise quite different Charles A. Beard and J. Franklin Jamieson, had treated the revolution as inseparable from social and economic issues. For them, the motivations even of the most revered of the revolutionary leaders had to be appraised in this context and with the realization that, in a socioeconomic sense, the revolution had produced losers as well as winners among eighteenth-century Anglo-Americans. A second generation of neo-

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Progressives, who added more sophisticated treatments of intellectual facets of the revolution and of class conflict, was centred at the University of Wisconsin. Although Merle Curti was one prominent member of this group, Merrill Jensen emerged as a more central figure in applying these approaches specifically to the revolutionary era. But the 1950s was notable for the emergence of counter-Progressive historians such as Edmund S. Morgan of Yale and Bernard Bailyn of Harvard. Morgan was the best known of the ‘consensus’ historians, who affirmed the coherence of revolutionary principles and those who fought for them. Bailyn, although already perceptibly moving towards the emphasis on a uniting ideology of the revolution that would make him by the late 1960s the leader of the ‘neo-Whigs,’ was better known initially for a Namier-like insistence on the importance of localism and pragmatism in colonial politics.60 Meanwhile, newer strands of interpretation – the New Left historians such as Jesse Lemisch, those such as Gary Nash who focused on social diversity and conflict, or gender-oriented revolutionary historians such as Linda Kerber and Mary Beth Norton – had still to make their mark at the time when Viola Barnes was seeking publication for her first volume.61 Defining Barnes in terms of this taxonomy would have been just as perplexing for her as for those who worked within it. Convinced of the importance of ideology in the revolution, and inclined like Bailyn to consider it a unifying force, she nevertheless saw its origins not in America but in a conflict among proponents of enlightened monarchy and radical republicanism in a transatlantic British political nation. Class conflict was also, for Barnes, an essential element of the revolution, and in this respect she had some points of convergence with the neo-Progressives. However, the class conflict that she identified in crowd actions – whether in London or in the colonies – was not a shaping or autonomous force. Rather, it was a tactic to be used by unscrupulous radicals and their Whig allies, adept at manipulating the crowd. While Barnes’s distaste for the radicalism on which she had expended so much research time was kept within bounds in her first volume, it was directly evident in her second and third. There, words such as ‘demagogue’ and ‘hothead’ began to make more frequent appearances. In those volumes too, the idiosyncracies that were identifiable in the first volume – the sprawl, the detailed exegesis of primary sources, the intrusiveness of interpretive quirks – were again magnified. The final two volumes, at least in the form in which they survive, were noticeably less compelling than the first. Her capacity for generating interpretive ideas remained evident, but

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the subtlety and self-discipline that would have been essential to expressing them coherently was not. Her exhaustive research remained as well, but it was channelled into lengthy narratives of action and reaction rather than into trenchant analysis. Yet volume 1, difficult as it was to classify in terms of existing revolutionary historiography, retained significant strengths. First, it extended the logic of the ‘imperial school’ into the revolutionary era. To younger historians of the 1950s, Barnes’s name was not one likely to come up in everyday historiographical conversation – although there could have been few who had not been required at one time or another to read her Dominion of New England. The ‘imperial school’ was associated more closely with Gipson, while there were also younger historians – notably Jack P. Greene – who insisted on the continuing importance of the works of Andrews in the effort to understand the preconditions for the revolution.62 Barnes, however, had extended the repertoire of the imperial historians not just to encompass the era after 1760 but also to portray an empire in which the dynamics of institutional development, in such areas as revenue generation and the administration of non-British peoples, had to be evaluated in the light of profound ideological division. It was an empire, simply put, in which the likes of Wilkes, Priestley, and Macaulay had an important place, no matter how much her distaste for them might be unleashed in her later work. Second, Barnes’s interpretation of the political significance of the British nation raised questions that would became central to certain groups of later historians. This is not to say, of course, that she anticipated their answers. Historians of the Loyalists, for example, would grapple with both the ideological and the socio-economic origins of Loyalism. In this sense, Loyalist studies would develop a mirror image of the Progressive/ counter-Progressive divide. The question that loyalist historians could not avoid was how it was possible during the revolution to be loyalist and American at the same time. Barnes’s analysis of the transatlantic dimensions of political conflict was controvertible enough, but it forcefully broached that question by arguing that there was a British polity spanning the Atlantic and that ideological division was integral to it. Her insistence on the roles of ideology and culture in the monarchy of George III also raised questions pertinent to the post-Namier era of British political history. Linda Colley’s 1992 portrayal of the king in the context of the emergence of a British patriotism, for example, differed clearly from that of Barnes. Yet the importance Colley attached to the matter of ‘Why George III was different’ and her emphasis on the cul-

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tural attributes of his kingship testify to the endurance of lines of enquiry that Barnes had also pursued.63 If, to be sure, the first volume of Barnes’s trilogy was her masterpiece, it was far from unflawed. Could it have been compared directly with the manuscript she had almost completed by the late 1930s, it undoubtedly would have come up short in discipline, coherence, and in the solid conviction carried by its line of argument. Even as it stood twenty years later, however, it was a probing and restlessly energetic piece of scholarship, its insights ultimately more worthy of attention than the eccentricities and omissions that accompanied them. The most immediate question in the spring of 1959, of course, was what Yale University Press would make of her work. It was a reasonable supposition that Edmund Morgan would have a hand in whatever response emerged. Not only had Morgan published in 1953, with Helen M. Morgan, an important study of the Stamp Act crisis, but he had also written shortly afterwards a concise and durable synthesis of the revolutionary era.64 These works established him as a leading exponent of the ‘consensus’ approach. He also published in 1957 a major historiographical article in the William and Mary Quarterly. ‘The American Revolution: Revisions in Need of Revising’ evaluated Progressive, ‘imperial school,’ and Namierite critiques of the nineteenth-century Whiggish interpretation of the revolution. Morgan assailed the Progressives, and by implication their neo-Progressive successors, for anachronistically equating an eighteenth-century preoccupation with property rights with nineteenth-century capital accumulation. The imperial approach, he argued, had ‘done more than any other to shape our understanding of the colonial past.’65 However, insofar as the imperial historians offered an apology for imperial institutions – a point on which Barnes would have given Morgan an argument – they failed in his view to explain why the revolution happened at all, and insofar as they attributed to British politicians the capacity to run an empire effectively they ran afoul of the Namierite emphasis on parochial concerns among parliamentarians. ‘In fact,’ Morgan commented, ‘the Namierist view and the view of the imperial historians are directly at odds here: though neither group seems as yet to be aware of the conflict, they cannot both be wholly right, and the coming of the Revolution would seem to confirm the Namierist view and to cast doubt on the imperialist one.’ The ‘Namier school’ itself, however, faced the problem of explaining the support of British Whig opposition leaders for the principles underlying the revolution – these were not localized issues. Morgan’s principal conclusions were that ‘the

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Whig interpretation of the American Revolution may not be as dead as some historians would have us believe,’ and that the way to test this proposition was through detailed research of the local social and political groupings that were crucial to the formulation of the revolutionary project.66 Most significantly, from the point of view of evaluating Barnes’s manuscript, Morgan not only took the ‘imperial school’ seriously while disagreeing with it, but also believed that the collision of the imperial and the Namierite approaches was an important interpretive issue. In this light, although Barnes’s manuscript was clearly lacking in explicit historiographical discussion, there could be no doubt of the pertinence of its central themes.67 In the event, Morgan was one of two readers of the manuscript. The other was Archibald S. Foord, Master of Calhoun College at Yale and at work on what would eventually become a major study of the role of opposition politics in eighteenth-century Britain. Morgan chose within a few months to reveal to Barnes his role in the evaluation of her manuscript, while also informing her that the other reader was an ‘English historian’ recruited because Morgan disqualified himself from evaluating the specifically British elements of the manuscript.68 Foord’s report expressed doubt about the importance Barnes attached to Enlightenment and Rousseauist ideas in her analysis of the kingship of George III, and in a private covering note to Yale editor David Horne he indicated more explicitly that he found her thesis unconvincing.69 Both readers were critical of the manuscript’s lack of engagement with the work of other historians. Both anticipated that it would face severe and justified criticism from reviewers if published unrevised.70 At the same time, both reports supported publication once revision was completed. The formal response dispatched by Horne in June 1959 faithfully reflected the readers’ comments. While praising Barnes’s research and calling for some condensation of the manuscript, the letter set out the chief requirement for publication: In brief, all readers feel that to make the book publishable you would have to take into account the works of modern scholarship – first and foremost Namier, but also, to cite a few names among many, [Richard] Pares, [Charles R.] Ritcheson, [Clarence W.] Alvord, [Robin] Humphreys, [Lawrence H.] Gipson, [Philip] Davidson, [Arthur M.] Schlesinger [Sr], and [Edmund S.] Morgan ... It is felt ... that the [primary-source] research constitutes only the first part – say the first two-thirds – of the job, and revision

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of one’s findings in the light of other scholars’ conclusions (or, in some cases, at least refutation of their conclusions) is almost as important to the finished book. All this does not mean we will not be glad to see the manuscript again if you can agree with our point of view and care to rework the book.71

Barnes’s immediate reaction was a hurried one, as the letter reached her when she was on the point of leaving for London to attend the annual Anglo-American conference of the Institute for Historical Research.72 She had taught the revolution almost continuously since 1911, she said, and had read everything of consequence about it. However, hers was neither a book about the many divergent interpretations of the revolution, nor a book based on secondary sources. In a research study, she asked, ‘should not the sources be the criterion, rather than what other historians say, since they differ so much?’ But the most revealing question she raised concerned the wording of the Yale letter itself: ‘What does [“]agree with your point of view[”] mean? On interpretation, or on method of writing the book?’73 Despite two more letters from Yale containing assurances that, far from being required to tailor her interpretations to the works of others, she was merely being asked to distinguish her conclusions explicitly from those authors with whom she disagreed, Barnes believed by late August that she knew the answer to her question. She had already travelled to Yale to collect her manuscript. Arriving unannounced, she claimed to have found it lying in some disarray on the floor. This evidence of disrespect apparently confirmed in Barnes’s mind the conclusion she had drawn from the letters, that ‘Yale has dropped support of the research project type, which is a totally different indoor sport from that of writing for the general public.’ Research studies, she insisted, depended exclusively on the researcher’s dialogue with the primary sources. The researcher should not be expected to interact explicitly with secondary materials, any more than Jonas Salk had been required to justify his vaccine by writing ‘a history of polio treatment by others, mentioning them all by name.’74 At this point, it seemed that publication of the manuscript by Yale was no longer a possibility. Barnes wrote long letters of complaint to other historians. She took her aggrievement directly to Morgan in October 1959, and received a regretful reply disclosing in outline his own role in the consideration of the manuscript and wishing her success with other publishers. To the publications committee of Yale University Press, Morgan reported his conclusion that ‘in the circumstances no other course

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Passport photograph, 1959 (Mount Holyoke College Archives and Special Collections)

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could have been followed by the editors.’75 Following further correspondence, however, Morgan visited Barnes in South Hadley on 11 February 1960, after speaking at a seminar at Mount Holyoke. He proposed a solution designed to bring the manuscript back to Yale. If Barnes would write a preface indicating that she was aware of the work of other historians, identifying those with whom she disagreed, and explaining the methodological principles underlying her decision to use only primary sources in the main text, he would then be willing to recommend publication. Barnes agreed, and they parted amicably.76 The understanding persisted into the summer, Morgan offering repeated encouragement. By the end of August, although slowed by the incident with the dental reamer, Barnes had drafted a preface.77 Yet she remained unhappy and uncertain about her decision. In September she made an approach to Harvard University Press, specifying that the manuscript was ‘based exclusively on primary sources as a research project,’ but received a reply a few weeks later deeming it unsuitable to be considered.78 The decisive blow to the chances of publication by Yale, however, came later in the fall with the publication of the latest volume of the Oxford History of England. Written by the Oxford historian J. Steven Watson, it dealt with the reign of George III.79 Barnes’s suspicions about this book had been aroused by a magazine article by another Oxford historian, the early modernist A.L. Rowse. At one point, until assured by Morgan that her manuscript had never left the shores of the United States, Barnes had supposed Rowse to be the ‘English historian’ who had been one of her readers.80 The article gave advance notice of the appearance of a ‘kinder’ interpretation of George III in Watson’s forthcoming work. When Barnes received the book, she quickly concluded that the author must have had access to her manuscript, or at least to arguments contained in it. She also contended some years later, to Leonard Labaree, that she had found errors in Watson’s book that had also been contained in her manuscript until she had checked and corrected them in London in the summer of 1959.81 Chapter and verse, however, were notably lacking in her assertions, except that Watson shared Barnes’s view of the importance of George III’s 1760 proclamation on vice – an emphasis that had been questioned by Foord, the ‘English historian.’82 For an allegation of impropriety, this was the flimsiest of grounds. In truth, the entire suggestion was a product of entrenched and indiscriminate suspicion, compounded by an unlikely chain of conjectures. Yet it led Barnes to confront Morgan with her dismay ‘that research could drop so low that two presses like Yale and Oxford with respectable reputations

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should be involved either by intention or careless safeguarding of a manuscript in their hands for consideration, in the theft of important points from it.’ Baffled, hurt, and frustrated, Morgan maintained the civility of an increasingly one-sided correspondence but no longer responded to repetitions of Barnes’s grievances. The matter of the manuscript’s publication by Yale University Press was now finally closed.83 Barnes had forfeited her last, best chance for publication. What lay ahead was a long series of approaches to academic and trade publishers that all, sooner or later, brought the same result. Princeton turned the manuscript down on the basis of a reader’s report that praised Barnes’s research but was sceptical of her view of George III as an Enlightenmentinfluenced reformer. Cambridge University Press indicated that an adverse decision had been reached ‘by a very narrow margin of opinion’ after the first reader’s report had been favourable; the difficulty had eventually been that ‘in general the consensus was that in reacting against the “tyrant myth,” you had swung rather too far in the other direction.’ Oxford University Press, after Barnes had demanded elaboration of a letter of rejection, responded by quoting from a scathing reader’s report that described key elements of her argument as being ‘hopelessly out of touch with reality.’84 And so it went on. The other rejections showed markedly greater respect than did the Oxford reader, but they were no less clear-cut for all that. Yale, in reality, had been the natural home for her manuscript. This was not only because of her own Yale connections, and the strength of Yale’s backlist in eighteenth-century American and British history – most recently, its publication in 1960 of a major study by another of Andrews’s former students, Dora Mae Clark85 – but also because of the support of Morgan. Revolutionary scholars who had publicly expressed a belief in the historiographical importance of engagement between imperial and Namierite approaches, as Morgan had done in 1957, were not in abundant supply in the late 1950s. For Barnes, it was a remarkable stroke of good fortune that her manuscript had gone to such a reader. That she had chosen to rebuff the publication opportunity that had been offered, not once but twice, was a personal tragedy. Yet it was a tragedy that had definable origins. Barnes’s anxieties that her work was being appropriated had not always been as fanciful as they were in 1960. She had come by her caution the hard way. There was also a natural protectiveness of a manuscript that represented some thirty years of work. That these instincts had intensified now to the point of being self-defeating was owed in part to long-standing personality traits that had seemed to become more acute with age. Whether or not Viola

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Barnes was clinically definable as having a paranoid personality disorder, Morgan and her brother Don would have headed the list of those who believed her prone to conjuring imagined threats even from the words and actions of those who wished her well.86 They would have been right. Yet there was an important sense too in which this tendency was socially constructed. Its roots lay not just in Barnes’s personality but in threats to her professional survival and advancement, particularly during the 1920s, that had been just as genuine as the scars they had left. More recently, during the 1950s, Barnes had increasingly felt herself to belong to two beleaguered minorities: women historians and ‘imperial school’ historians. Even as her apprehensions deepened during her later years, and would eventually move far away from any reasoned basis, they always retained a connection with the fate of her manuscript – and thus with her professional self – rather than invading other areas of her life indiscriminately. Obtrusive as these irrational fears ultimately became, they never quite came untethered from their origins in real adversity.87 For now, apart from sending letters to individual colleagues, the first and principal forum in which Barnes felt able to air her complaints against Yale University Press was at the Berkshire Conference. There in the spring of 1960 she received strong support, and was urged not to compromise her insistence on the supremacy of primary over secondary sources.88 Shortly afterwards, the Berkshire president Caroline Robbins wrote to Barnes not only to thank her for the ‘gaiety and verve and wit’ she had brought to the meeting but also to encourage her to press ahead: ‘I’m sure people want to read your book, need to. Princeton Harvard Macmillan all good bets I’d say.’89 It was true, of course, that the Berkshire discussion had been predicated on Barnes’s own interpretation of Yale’s position, rather than on the position the press itself maintained that it had taken. Nevertheless, while her charges of gross improprieties by the press were wide of the mark, repeated sardonic references to her in its internal correspondence (and in the minutes of the publications committee) as ‘the lady’ or ‘the lady from Mount Holyoke’ suggest that age and gender assumed at least some role in the approach taken to her manuscript.90 Thus, it was understandable for Barnes to believe that the difficulties she was encountering represented yet another manifestation of the more general ‘slant against women’ in the profession, and that the Berkshire Conference provided the only setting in which she could safely seek the collective advice of a group of colleagues.91 The other side of the coin appeared at the American Historical Association meetings that December. Along with Helen Taft Manning of Bryn

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Mawr, another of Andrews’s former students and the author of a study of British colonial government in the era following the American Revolution,92 Barnes attended a session on the Revolution of 1688–9. It was a field in which, as the author of The Dominion of New England – which had been reprinted just a few weeks before as one of the American Classics series of Frederick Ungar Publishing – she had every right to be regarded as an authority of long standing.93 As she frequently and aggrievedly recalled in future years, however, her intervention in the discussion was cut short when the chair, Carl Bridenbaugh, ended the session. Another historian present, Jack P. Greene, commented just over a year later that the questions Barnes had attempted to have answered ‘seemed to represent a rather fundamentally different point of view [from those of the panelists] and might have generated a good discussion.’ He suggested that Bridenbaugh might have been motivated simply by the approach of the lunch hour. The possibility also comes to mind that Barnes was making an extended speech at the time. Nevertheless, corroboration for Barnes’s account came from Manning, who firmly believed that they had been treated rudely. One speaker, according to Manning, had implied in a patronizing tone that her criticism of his arguments had reflected an old-fashioned dependence on Andrews and his approach.94 Certainly, it is not difficult to read the account of the session published in the American Historical Review as supporting this recollection: ‘The discussion, in which the imperial school (descendants of C.M. Andrews) predominated, disliked the tendency of the papers to soft-pedal the imperial outlook.’95 Both as a woman and as an ‘imperial school’ historian, Barnes was justified in her apprehension that neither she nor her studies were being taken as seriously as they deserved. For her, it was a short step from there to her suspicions of outright unethical behaviour in others. It was a dangerous one, however, especially for herself. For Viola Barnes, retirement had not proved tranquil. She would not have wished or expected it to be, but neither could she have foreseen the troubles that she would encounter in her professional life in the later 1950s. In one sense, Barnes was the author of her own misfortunes. However, she was also acutely conscious of living through an era when historians of her gender and approach were declining in numbers and influence. She was equally well aware that time was passing rapidly, and soon it must run short. Turning seventy-five years of age in 1960, she had reason to doubt whether her research would ever see the light of day in published form.

CH APTE R 6

‘I have had a very happy old age’: Long life, 1960–1979

By her own account in 1972, Viola Barnes was enjoying her later years. ‘I have had a very happy old age,’ she reflected, ‘free from financial worries due to my having interested myself in the stock market shortly before and after I retired.’1 While the appreciation of her stocks undoubtedly added to the comfort of her retirement, she attributed her contentment to more than just material circumstances. Aged eighty-nine in the fall of 1974, she busied herself with yard work, which she cited as an example of what she believed to be her vital secret: ‘As long as all is well above the neck, there is no reason to [be] giving up one’s old life style. I have been retired more than 20 years and I am never bored.’2 Friendships persisted despite the declining health of more and more contemporaries and the loss of some to death. Humour also remained, as when she regaled the absent Miff during the summer of 1968 with the story of how she had forgotten to put a coin in a parking meter in Holyoke but had been spared a ticket by a sympathetic police officer. ‘It is funny,’ she concluded. ‘I seem to have better luck with cops than with presses.’3 Yet the central paradox of the last two decades of her life was that, despite the zest for living that undoubtedly stayed with her, she was descending ever more deeply into the dark fantasy of a conspiracy against the publication of her manuscript. Year by year, the imagined scope of the plot became wider. Her suspicions strained professional connections of long standing, and all but destroyed her relationship with her brother Don. It was true that there were areas of her professional life that remained unconsumed by her mistrust. When she referred in 1968 to ‘two of my favorite crusades, research and the cause of women,’ she represented accurately her continuing interest in the Berkshire group –

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despite having reservations about the feminism of the 1960s and 1970s – and her correspondence on research topics with those historians she saw as non-threatening.4 Still, the paradox was now rooted deep in her experience and her being, and it persisted to the end of her life. In the mid-1960s, Viola Barnes wrote supportively to Miff’s brother, who had been forbidden alcoholic refreshment following a kidney operation. She recalled her own surgeon admonishing her not to eat greasy foods after her operation in 1960: I ... said, How about a Bourbon, and he said, I never heard that a Bourbon was greasy. So he left me with that great joy in life. I find I can still take aboard as much as ever, except, with a bad knee there comes a time sooner, when locomotion appears dangerous. After a third Manhattan at our Faculty Club, I had, once, to stand still quite awhile when I should have been going home, because I dared not shift my weight.5

Bourbon, or scotch, represented for Barnes a social recreation and not a solitary anaesthetic. Nevertheless, her own observation that her capacity was large was confirmed by at least one friend who recalled nursing one drink while Barnes would refill her glass frequently.6 Her fondness for a drink was not new in the 1960s. As long ago as 1935 her brother Don had advised her to cut back in the interests of her health. When she invited a neighbour to visit her newly completed house in the early 1950s, it was for ‘a highball or tea.’7 Yet old age had provided new contexts. Late-evening conclaves in her own house with a trusted guest, and a bottle of Johnnie Walker Red, would allow her to range widely over the unfolding of her life and the fate of her manuscript. Her appearances at the faculty club, at a university reception, or at the house of a friend were more ceremonial. Paying her tribute before the Mount Holyoke faculty following her death, Dean William S. McFeely (whom she had strongly suspected late in her life of collaborating with the conspiracy against the manuscript) offered a revealing vignette: I remember that once after being treated to a particularly savage attack one morning, I went, that evening, to a reception in [the] Willits Hallowell [Center]. It was raining hard and windy and I was making my way to the door when I saw her stepping out of her car. I didn’t know what to expect; what I got was a splendidly charming greeting. And I remember too that the foot that stepped out of that car was in a fine patent leather shoe.8

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Stanley Katz, at the time a young early Americanist at Harvard and thenceforward a firm friend of Barnes, took a similar impression from his first meeting with her at the house of his father-in-law (the Mount Holyoke philosopher Roger W. Holmes). ‘She appeared,’ he recalled, ‘wearing a hat and white gloves, carrying a purse, and stuck out her hand as she was introduced to me saying: “Young man, I am Viola Florence Barnes, a disciple of Charles McLean Andrews!”’9 While drinking was more incidental on formal occasions such as these than in the presence of a guest in her own house, alcohol with its social trappings was significant to both sorts of circumstances. For Barnes, it provided a secure area within which dignity need not be compromised by any selfindulgences into which her ruminations on the manuscript might lead her on any given day or evening. It was an indispensable buffer to prevent her social needs and her professional frustrations from grating too painfully together. Her association with Miff also remained essential, even though at this stage in their lives the thirteen-year difference in their ages assumed a new significance. While Miff socialized with a younger group of college friends, Viola’s circle was narrowing. On Christmas morning of 1970, she wrote as much to Don: I do not do much entertaining any more, for so many of my friends now are gone from here, either settling elsewhere when they retire, or dropping off for good. But I do sometimes invite people to drinks. Mildred lives a gay social life and knows everybody, but most of her entertaining is done with people I do not know much or at all. This Christmas has been sad because three of my friends are in the hospital, one with a broken wrist from falling in the snow, one with [a] broken collarbone from being in an auto-accident, and one who fell suddenly with a stroke and has not been conscious since.10

Summers could be difficult too, if Miff was travelling and Viola was not.11 Much of their travelling, however, was done together. Miff retired from the Mount Holyoke faculty in 1963, their relationship recognized by Viola’s prominent placement at the head table during the retirement dinner, and thereafter they planned forays both abroad and closer to home.12 They spent time in London in 1964, although the trip was marred by Viola’s damaging her knee in falling off a London bus.13 A planned sojourn in Spain in 1967 had to be cancelled when Miff took ill, and five years later they reluctantly decided that a proposed tour of Europe on a rail pass might be too taxing.14 None of this deterred them

At Miff’s retirement dinner, May 1963. Viola is third from left, Miff third from right. (Mount Holyoke College Archives and Special Collections)

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from driving 2300 miles during the fall of 1968 to tour Quebec and Canada’s Maritime provinces. It struck Viola that ‘Canada ... seemed poor and undeveloped in comparison with the USA.’15 She and Miff never ventured that far north again, although they did make a short visit to Vermont in 1974. Just a few days short of Viola’s eighty-ninth birthday, she described the recent trip as being ‘chiefly for the ride and the break in our work.’16 In a more domestic sense too, their partnership continued to flourish. Visiting back and forth between their houses on a day-to-day basis, they continued also to collaborate in their outdoor labours. Viola, aged eighty-nine and having trouble not only with her knee but also with inner ear problems that affected her balance, described how ‘the raking and carting of my leaves I could do easily, by putting them in a big laundry basket and with rope, drawing them to Mildred’s lot across the way where she was gathering leaves to fill in a too low area.’17 When they were separated, Viola eagerly awaited letters and postcards, while reporting in turn on her regular visits to check on Miff’s house and any other items of local news.18 Occasionally in these letters, the old emotions that still underpinned a long and successful relationship would reach the surface, as when Viola wrote following Miff’s departure on a visit to Maryland in March 1969: ‘I miss you. And I am wondering if you took along enough warm clothes. It turned so cold here after you left and the last I saw you, you were wearing your gray suit, looking very stylish and beautiful, but not well padded.’19 Viola did concede to advancing age in withdrawing from serious gardening. Discouraged by rabbits, woodchucks, and crows, she abandoned her vegetable gardens in the 1950s and later she gave up on her shrubs and flowers. As she put it to a correspondent in 1966, her activities in the garden or anywhere else were a long way from justifying the impression of some that she was ‘an elderly Tarzan.’20 But she did take pride in active and cheerful living, and deplored what she took to be the opposite tendencies in her brother. ‘The swimming pool of his grand apartment house is closed for repairs,’ she editorialized in 1970 after receiving a letter from Don, ‘but ... he and his friends gather around it just the same and chat and sound like the usual group of old men in English parks and old peoples homes. How dull!’21 In herself, she relished the ‘warm sense of fun’ for which a correspondent praised her in 1974.22 She rated her academic work as a source of unfailing personal joy and satisfaction. To a niece in 1972, while acknowledging that she had failed to place her manuscript with a publisher, she attested that she had always been

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happy in her work.23 To Merle Curti a decade earlier, she had been even more specific: When my brother Don was a little boy he entered a race at a Sunday school picnic, a pie-eating race with a prize promised at the end. It turned out to be pumpkin which he hated. He won it ... and with the last mouthful he turned to the director and said where is the prize? The man said, you have eaten it! It may be that way with my research project, with the difference that I have thoroughly enjoyed every bit of it and would not have missed doing it for anything.24

Viola Barnes’s portrayal of herself as living a vigorous and satisfying life even while she aged was undoubtedly sincere and valid. Yet here was the paradox, for she also remained perpetually conscious of what she described in 1968 as the ‘personal tragedy’ of her unpublished manuscript.25 Throughout the 1960s and well into the 1970s, she continued to revise her work. In the spring of 1969, she declined an invitation from Jackson Turner Main to speak to a departmental seminar at the State University of New York in Stony Brook because she was too busy with her trilogy. ‘I hope to publish soon,’ she informed Main, ‘and must be ready when the opportunity comes.’26 In the summer of 1970 she reported to Miff that she was happy with what she had written for the preface and introduction, ‘the very last phase of the book.’ Even so, she continued to rewrite some passages for at least another six years.27 The evidence suggests that as far as any essential changes in her thinking were concerned, the principle of diminishing returns had begun to operate. She made a final research trip to London in 1961 and returned, as from previous sojourns, with work diaries filled with interpretive ideas and questions for future consideration. Not surprisingly, they largely concerned the issues that were central to her second and third volumes. In particular, she wrestled with the question of what circumstances, if any, might have forestalled the revolution.28 From at least 1962 onwards, the central themes of these volumes remained substantially as she had by then conceived of them.29 As she revised and rewrote, Barnes continued to seek publication for the first volume. The news was seldom encouraging. It was true that the editor at Johns Hopkins University Press admired her work – ‘the writing is good to brilliant, and the amount of research supporting that writing is simply staggering’ – but readers’ reports were divided, and financially the prospect of two more volumes to come was unwelcome.30

Long Life, 1960–1979

A very happy old age, 1960s (Mount Holyoke College Archives and Special Collections)

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Other rejections came with or without the cushioning of such praise.31 Dismayed by her continuing lack of success with university presses, she turned in 1965 to Frederick Ungar Publishing, the publishers of the reprinted edition of her Dominion of New England. Ungar agreed to waive its normal requirement for an external reader’s report, while requiring from Barnes a subsidy of $4000 on the first volume. By January 1966, the publisher was ready to start production.32 Then the problems began. Ungar’s editors proposed stylistic changes: breaking up of long paragraphs, recasting of convoluted sentences, some changes in capitalization and punctuation. Barnes refused point-blank, and by the end of February the manuscript was on its way back to her with the personal admonition of Frederick Ungar that no reputable publisher would bring out a book without basic copy-editing. ‘You would probably save yourself and some other publishing company a great deal of time and needless agitation,’ he warned, ‘if you recognized the fact that only a printer with whom you work directly, and pay for his services, will set your manuscript dot for dot and line for line as you type it.’33 Barnes took Ungar’s advice literally. In 1969, she approached the Shoe String Press. Based in North Haven, Connecticut, Shoe String was a family-owned publishing house with strong ties to the university library at Yale, specializing in reprints but also by now publishing some of its own titles. Among its imprints was Archon Books. From initial correspondence, Barnes drew the impression that she could reach an agreement to have the manuscript printed unaltered at her expense. To keep her own cost down she shortened the first volume by ending it at 1766 instead of 1768. Somewhere, however, confusion had arisen. Again, suggestions for stylistic changes provoked from Barnes an angry reaction. This time the matter ended, in January 1972, with an offended editor making the seemingly unexceptionable point that ‘even the best of writers need editing at times.’34 Thus, twice in the space of a few years, Barnes had again rejected opportunities to have her first volume published. It was true that both involved expense, and neither offered the prestige of publication by a university press. But these were not the issues. What was at stake in each case was her refusal to accept even the slightest editorial intervention. This from an author who, albeit decades before and perhaps grudgingly, had credited Charles McLean Andrews’s close editorial scrutiny with clarifying ‘vague and ambiguous’ passages in the published version of her Dominion of New England.35 She must have been aware too that any one of the numerous university presses she had

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approached would have required copy-editing at least as rigorous as had Ungar Publishing and Shoe String Press. The explanation may partly have been that Barnes would not tolerate from those publishers what she would have accepted from Yale or another university press. However, there was more to it than that. By now, every dealing that involved her manuscript was suffused with her ever-growing suspicions. As she put it to a friend in the spring of 1972. ‘Some force wants my manuscript not published.’36 Although she did not attribute any leading role in the conspiracy either to Ungar or to Shoe String Press, she did suspect them of complicity. Shortly after the episode with Ungar, she wrote to Merle Curti that she had withdrawn the manuscript because of unacceptable editing. ‘But,’ she continued, ‘is this all part of the sort of plot to push those of us in another [historical] school, mine the imperial, off the map?’37 And among her complaints to Shoe String Press was the allegation that its Yale connections had led to some sort of illicit involvement of Yale historians in its treatment of the manuscript.38 Increasingly, however, she believed that she was the victim of a covert campaign involving far more than a few historians at Yale or anywhere else. For Barnes, the conspiracy was not only real but kept on expanding. In her mind, it encompassed at one time or another virtually every living person or group she had ever mistrusted, from Bryn Mawr to the Kennedy White House. With its twin goals of preventing the publication of her manuscript, while at the same time allowing her research findings to be plagiarized, the supposed plot had begun with the small-scale but unsavoury collusion of Yale University Press and Oxford University Press in 1959 and 1960. The Institute of Early American History and Culture and its journal, the William and Mary Quarterly, had signalled their involvement in early 1960 with the publication of a new policy statement explicitly requiring manuscripts submitted for publication to situate their findings in historiographical context. Significantly for Barnes, Edmund Morgan was a member of the Institute’s council at the time.39 That Morgan should continue to be identified by Barnes as a key member of the movement against her was a profound irony, since to anybody who asked he consistently maintained that her manuscript was a first-rate study and deserved publication.40 But such was the texture of her apprehensions. Soon, she was convinced that university presses were involved as a group. In 1966 she broached her suspicions with Chester Kerr, director of Yale University Press. ‘Is it true,’ she asked, ‘that the association of university presses, have a veto committee on decisions of

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individual presses?’41 She supposed too that publishers were colluding with their anonymous readers to reject manuscripts they did not like, while strip-mining their authors’ basic research findings to be integrated into more acceptable works.42 All of this, in Barnes’s view, was connected with the powerful emergence of a new form of the ‘crusade history’ against which she had been inveighing since the late 1940s. It came in part, she believed, from efforts being made by Daniel Boorstin, Carl Bridenbaugh, and others to resurrect a crudely patriotic interpretation – ‘back-to-Bancroft’ – of colonial and revolutionary history in preparation for the 1976 bicentennial.43 It was connected also with attempts by British and American historians to homogenize the teaching of history in both schools and universities, based on a social-studies model. The leaders, she believed, were Herbert Butterfield, Lawrence Gipson, and Caroline Robbins. Especially sinister in Robbins – a long-standing friend from the Berkshire Conference – was the fact that her institution was Bryn Mawr and that she thus represented the domineering ‘Bryn Mawr spirit.’44 Collectively, this group had ‘tried to capture control of historical thought, particularly on the American revolution and the civil war.’ They had succeeded notably in ‘capturing control of the university presses, some of the commercial presses, [and] the National Council for the Social Studies.’45 There was, however, even more than this involved. The presidency of John F. Kennedy, Barnes believed, had seen the emergence of a new and covert movement among liberal-minded historians to write propaganda for an interventionist foreign policy. This was, she wrote in 1966, ‘Kennedy’s Camelot crusade, based on telling the world about the declaration of independence as the great deliverer for all peoples under colonialism, monarchy or aristocracy. This group of Kennedy’s among the historians admit that they have inspired revolts in Africa, etc ... and they hope to save the world before 1976.’46 The ‘world crusade,’ for Barnes, survived Kennedy’s death, and its corollary was that ‘older schools of writing must be destroyed.’47 She confided her fears to Merle Curti in early 1967: ‘Are we in the midst of a dictatorship? Can it be possible, that this is America, dedicated to oneness and suppression of freedom of thought and press? ... I now have three independent studies completed, each on one of George III’s early parliaments with their colonial policy. Must they go down the drain?’48 As time went on, the scope of the supposed intrigues continued to expand. Race riots in the summer of 1967 confirmed the existence of the ‘Camelot conception’ and its tendency to subvert both the social order

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and the writing of history.49 A Jewish influence was also at work, Barnes believed, that again had connections to the Kennedy White House but also operated at Harvard, Yale, and Oxford. The university presses in particular, she had been told, had fallen under the control of ‘a group of young Jewish business men ... [who] were interested only in sales, not in research.’50 All in all, as she explained to one of her nieces in 1972, it was no coincidence that the initial troubles with her manuscript at Yale had come ‘at the beginning of the attack on current civilization and the revolutionary drive to destroy our “WASP” civilization (you know, White, AngloSaxon, Protestant, which the minorities feature).’51 With all of this, she came to believe that she was being subjected to a variety of forms of personal harassment. Her visit to London with Miff in 1964, for example, had been preceded by a delay in the issuing of her passport, which she was inclined to interpret as an effort to prevent her from visiting the Public Record Office.52 By the final years of her life, she was troubled by the fear that intruders were entering her house to search for her manuscript, with the connivance both of Mount Holyoke historians and Yale University Press.53 Viola Barnes’s conviction that she was being persecuted by unseen and relentless forces exacted from her a heavy price. It was paid not only in such personal forms as her eventual sense of insecurity in her own house and the countless hours that were sacrificed to the typing of long letters of complaint, but also in the strain it placed on long-standing professional relationships. The most supportive of her professional friends took to simply ignoring the more extravagant of her allegations, or gently rebutting them, while validating what they saw as reasonable. Helen Taft Manning allowed that ‘there is a tendency on the part of some of the rising generation to treat the Andrews point of view as old fashioned, but I don’t take it very seriously.’54 Merle Curti thought her difficulties might be traced to the attitudes of ‘the new generation of historians [who] look patronizingly on those of our generation. They seem to feel that we are have-beens, that what we did is very old-fashioned, that only revisionist studies are worth the profession’s eye.’55 And when Barnes connected her troubles with bias against women she received from a senior official of the American Association of University Women the terse endorsement, ‘I can easily believe it.’56 Yet, however valid it might be to see age and gender as long-term contributors to Barnes’s predicament and to her beleaguered sensibilities, there were those such as Morgan who were well aware that her manuscript could have been published if she had made minimal concessions to

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editorial privilege. More generally, it was inevitable that recipients of her letters would be impatient with her allegations of conspiracy, and in some cases with her direct accusations. ‘I do not believe and never did believe that you or anyone else should conform to my interpretations or anyone else’s,’ wrote a frustrated though still-courteous Morgan in 1967.57 ‘I think I can say with entire confidence,’ Leonard Labaree assured her wearily two years later, ‘that no “group of young Jewish business men” has taken control of the Yale University Press, either directly or indirectly.’58 Helen Taft Manning understandably became disillusioned when her own role came into question: ‘Now that you have accused me of being in league with Labaree and others in New Haven I see no point in continuing the discussion.’ She continued to look forward to seeing Barnes at Berkshire meetings, she said, but not to any further revisiting of the issue of the manuscript.59 Caroline Robbins, who probably never knew the extent of Barnes’s doubts about her, tried to clear the air by assuring her that she ‘never saw your MS nor was I asked to’ and that she was not ‘a Bancroft man – years since I read him.’60 On the whole, the response to Barnes’s many letters to fellow-historians was restrained and respectful, and in the case of old friends such as Curti and Robbins their affection for her was still palpable. Not only was she unmistakably in a troubled state of mind, but also there was an evident vulnerability in her efforts to come to terms with the likelihood that her major study would never be published. ‘I have published a lot of things in a long career,’ she remarked to Labaree, ‘and have never, since Yale days had a rejection of anything until these pseudo times. I have had superlative praise for this particular manuscript, and I myself know it is the best I have done, along with the next two.’61 It was a harsh reality, however, that when her greatest wish was for validation as the gifted and senior historian she was, her suspicions and allegations contributed powerfully to ensuring that the recognition she craved from a new generation would continue to elude her. At the same time, Barnes did maintain some professional interests that were more or less independent of her preoccupation with the manuscript. There is no indication that she continued to read systematically, either in early American history or on the controversies unfolding within the profession over the integration of history and social-science methods. This despite the direct relevance of these issues, along with those raised by the growing influence of New Left historians during the 1960s, to the sustainability of the notion of the objective use of primary sources to which she was so irrevocably committed.62 Although she passed time in

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the library at Mount Holyoke (where she retained a small office), it seems that much of it was spent cornering staff members for lengthy updates on the status of her manuscript and of the machinations against it.63 ‘She was like a hermit as far as the profession was concerned,’ recalled Stanley Katz; ‘she did not keep up with recent scholarship.’64 Most of what reading she did pursue in her field seems to have consisted either of books presented to her or works she combed to check for shortcomings in primary-source research. For her birthday in 1968, for example, Don sent her a copy of Towards a New Past: Dissenting Essays in American History, edited by Barton J. Bernstein.65 Perhaps surprisingly, she professed herself ‘delighted’ with the book and praised some of the essays. With Jesse Lemisch’s treatment of ‘The American Revolution Seen from the Bottom Up,’ however, she was unimpressed. Among other shortcomings, she believed that Lemisch’s lack of engagement with manuscript sources resulted in conclusions based on ‘sheer imagination.’ Overall, the book confirmed for her the ascendancy of authors who ‘are not really historians, but members of the social science group, who are interested chiefly in checking in history for the points the social sciences stress, which coincide with their current crusades, class divisions, the poor, negroes, status, education, living standards, crime, punishment, etc.’66 Yet there were authors Barnes liked better. One was Jack P. Greene, who in 1962 had encouraged her to persevere with her manuscript, convinced by his own studies that ‘nothing is more critical than the whole question of British policy in the period 1750–1775.’67 She was also impressed with Bernard Bailyn’s work on pre-revolutionary pamphlets, in 1966 according Bailyn the accolade ‘You, more than any of the rest of us, represent what Andrews foresaw as the path ahead, the intellectual development of the colonies, following the economic and social.’68 She later considered Bailyn’s The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution to be ‘probably the best book on the revolution,’ although she criticized it both for discussing ideology in isolation from popular political action and for ignoring the intellectual origins of Loyalism.69 In 1970, she was pleased to receive a complimentary copy of Alison Gilbert Olson’s and Richard Maxwell Brown’s edited collection AngloAmerican Political Relations, 1675–1775.70 Olson’s introductory chapter explicitly cited the work of Andrews as a point of departure and a continuing influence on the book’s key themes. Barnes valued the book, she wrote to Stanley Katz – whose own chapter on early-eighteenthcentury New York politics she praised specifically – ‘not only because it

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is interesting in its own right, but because I know how pleased Mr. Andrews would have been to know that so many people are now working on his approach to the colonial field, that is, the consideration of all the American colonies as a unit, not just those which seceded in 1776.’71 Of other correspondents Barnes was more critical. She resented Lawrence Gipson’s emergence, through his multi-volume study of the British Empire before the American Revolution, as the most acclaimed of practising imperial historians. Barnes had never rated Gipson’s scholarship highly, and it was an ill-judged courtesy when he sent her in 1967 an offprint of his contribution to a Festschrift for the historian and academic administrator John E. Pomfret. Gipson’s fifteen-page sketch, ‘The Imperial Approach to Early American History,’ earned from Barnes a scathing and ill-humoured critique, as well as an accusation that he had been one of the anonymous readers who had blocked her manuscript from publication.72 On other occasions when Barnes offered direct criticisms of the works of others, she was more diplomatic. When she wrote to Wesley Frank Craven in 1968 with a list of errors he had made on the Dominion of New England in his recently published The Colonies in Transition, 1660–1713, she also congratulated him on the book as a whole. It was, Craven responded, a ‘kind letter ... from one upon whose work I drew so heavily.’73 Also a gracious recipient of correction was Richard S. Dunn, whose contribution to the Olson and Brown collection had included a footnote reference to Barnes’s Dominion of New England asserting, ‘V.F. Barnes views Andros’ regime from a nostalgic imperial perspective.’74 Barnes skewered this assertion by asking Dunn to clarify exactly in what her nostalgia consisted. She also took the opportunity to recall that it was her questioning of Dunn’s paper that had preceded Carl Bridenbaugh’s closing off of the 1960 American Historical Association session, aggrieving her ever since. Dunn, in reply, agreed that his words had been poorly chosen, and was conciliatory regarding their disagreement in 1960: ‘I have no wish to quarrel with you on this or any other subject, Miss Barnes. I have great respect for your work on the Dominion, and as I grow somewhat older and wiser, I find that my respect for your book grows also.’75 Thus, Barnes’s contacts with other historians during her later years were often prompted by her self-appointed role as a guardian of the Andrews approach. That she had come to see Gipson as a rival in this capacity added pungency to her interventions, most of all at Gipson’s own expense. At all times, however, it was an essentially reactive exercise. The measuring stick for her praise or blame was a discrete – some

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would have said outdated – body of scholarship, rather than any inclusive vision of an evolving historiography. In turn, the respect with which Barnes was treated did not imply the kind of recognition for which she would have hoped if her manuscript had been published. When John Higham, working on his general study of United States historiography, wrote to thank her in 1962 for advising him on Osgood and Andrews, it was to acknowledge that ‘I need and value greatly the kind of information that some of my seniors, such as yourself, can provide.’76 When Barnes received a request in 1970 to have her work included in a student reader on Colonial America, it was for a reprint of chapter 1 of her Dominion of New England, not only on its merits but also on the ground that ‘it is important for students to be made aware of the “imperial” interpretation as well as others so that they might decide for themselves what is most acceptable to them.’77 And when she was informed in 1973 that she need no longer pay dues in order to maintain her membership in the American Historical Association, it was because of her fifty-seven years of membership.78 There was nothing patronizing or insincere in any of this, but there was an implicit sense that she was valued as an august survivor from a bygone age rather than as a working historian. Perhaps this was why she had earlier expressed reservations about having any special status in the American Historical Association, noting, ‘I ... am, in the best health of my whole life, and have continued to do my research as usual ... [so] I have gone on with my many memberships in organizations as usual.’79 It was true that Barnes enjoyed good health. To be sure, she had a long list of ailments, but they did not prevent her doctor from pronouncing in 1973 that, in her words, ‘he found my general condition perfect, he said not a single organ showed effects of my years.’80 Accidents posed a greater threat than illness. Her fall from a London bus in 1964 resulted in knee surgery the following year, and seriously curtailed the walking, running, and dancing exercises she had carried on regularly in her basement until that time.81 A few days after she had informed a correspondent in early 1971 that (except for ‘long overland trips alone’) she was still driving as usual, she was involved in an alarming though not disastrous automobile accident near her house. She confided to Don afterwards: ‘I am scared to drive any more, more than down to the village.’82 In late December 1972, a fall on unseen ice on her doorstep left her barely able to crawl back into her house. Although no bones were broken, severe bruising made all activity painful for a time and added further to the caution with which she contemplated going out in winter. By

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the winter of 1975, as she indicated to her niece Elizabeth, matters had deteriorated further because of her inner-ear problems: ‘I dare not step out when it is slippery, and so never get to town unless taken.’83 As Barnes looked at the wider world around her, especially during the late 1960s, she also found more general reasons for concern about the changes brought by time. Her disapproval of inner-city rioting extended also to campus protest. The students, she commented to Don in the spring of 1968, ‘want to run the whole show’ – even at Mount Holyoke, there was controversy over student demands for representation on the board of governors.84 A year later, she marvelled at disturbances at Columbia and the University of Wisconsin, and in early 1970 it was the occupation of seven Mount Holyoke buildings by African-American students that aroused her indignation.85 When Richard Nixon had won the presidency in 1968, with the help of her own vote, Barnes had been hopeful that counter-revolutionary forces were on the march. Yet intensifying protests against the Vietnam war made her wonder in 1970, ‘Do the incendiary leaders of the youth rebellion really want Russia to conquer us?’86 The loosening of sexual constraints offended her, as did the increasing numbers of Mount Holyoke women who, in her view, came to the college in search of a ‘marvellous sex experience’ rather than an education. ‘I cannot see any reason,’ she complained to Don, ‘for turning Mary Lyon’s missionary factory into a tart camp.’87 She was critical too of modern feminism. It was characterized, she believed, by a volatile combination of intellectualizing gender issues through spurious sociological analysis and, at the same time, undertaking anti-discrimination campaigns of ‘the current crusade variety.’88 In her critique, she was consistent with her own action-oriented and individualistic approach to gender issues, as well as with her characteristic political distaste for any group that blamed oppression for what she saw as lack of individual endeavour. Nevertheless, just as Barnes was prepared to admit on occasion that the student movement was addressing a genuine need for reform, and even that it was ‘refreshing to see some centers of youth so idealistic and altruistic,’89 so she paralleled her criticisms of feminist action with her belief that male insurgency remained a threat to academic and professional women. After the Berkshire Conference meeting in 1967 she reflected to Caroline Robbins that, although more women were now taking doctoral work than when she had been at that stage, they were still having difficulty finding employment:

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I have heard young women complain of the partiality and one has only to look at the list of officers who run such organizations as the AHA to see how very few women are permitted in office, in comparison with the numbers relatively ... in my day. I think the men have to some extent, ganged up in a spirit of camaraderie to do things for other men through that spirit rather than on the basis of impartial appraisal of fitness. I wish we could do something about it.90

Barnes attended Berkshire events less frequently than in earlier years, but in 1971 she was invited as ‘one of the most active older members’ to attend the spring meeting as a special guest. Characteristically, she accepted the invitation but insisted on donating an amount equal to her weekend expenses in support of future invitations to distinguished scholars.91 She returned from the meeting as sceptical as ever of such initiatives as the demand for university-sponsored day care, but impressed despite herself by meeting ‘many very intelligent younger women, mostly married and mostly with children.’92 She was convinced that these current women scholars faced systematic discrimination of a kind that had not existed in her own younger days.93 Barnes was again honoured by the Berkshire group in 1978, as both the spring meeting and the nowannual summer conference (held that year at Mount Holyoke) were devoted in part to recognizing the organization’s founders on its fiftieth anniversary. Aged ninety-two, however, she was too frail by that time to attend.94 As Viola Barnes struggled to come to terms with perplexing social changes, as well as with her own suspicions and fears, she came in some respects to rely on family support. Her correspondence with Don – depending on the state of their relationship at any given time – was often her chief outlet for complaints about the state of the world. She also wrote regularly to her nieces Elizabeth and Mary O. about her own and the family’s history.95 Perhaps as a welcome variant from her own publication difficulties, she began to work towards republication of her father’s The Sod House. Proposing it in 1969 to the University of Nebraska Press, which lost no time in accepting, she commented to Don that it had now gained recognition as a classic work and a valuable primary source on prairie history. The remaining copies of the first edition had apparently been sold by their sister Ruby for next to nothing. The new edition appeared in 1970.96 Encouraged, Viola now began to seek a publisher for her father’s unpublished memoirs.

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Although overlapping in some respects with the earlier book – originally, it had all been one large manuscript – the memoirs gave more details of personal and family history.97 Correspondingly, however, they were less marketable than The Sod House. Eventually, Viola herself typed the 113 pages of text, added a foreword of her own, and had 100 copies printed in a plain, offset edition. Impatient as she was with printing delays, this procedure circumvented any disputes over editing. When the book was ready in 1973, she took pride in distributing it to family members and historical societies.98 At the same time as the memoirs appeared, however, Viola expressed alarm about the ‘hysterical letters’ she had been receiving from Don. He, it seemed, would take exception to Viola’s own letters, ‘warp them out of context and put them in his violent language.’99 It was true that Don repeatedly chastised Viola for sending him ‘vile’ and ‘abusive’ letters. By 1973, he announced that he had reluctantly accepted the verdict of a friend of his who had commented, ‘your sister is insanely jealous of you.’100 While this was undoubtedly an oversimplification, so was Viola’s belief that ‘Don not only has these excited spells but his ego is enormous.’101 Despite spells of agreeable correspondence, and their regular exchange of Christmas and birthday gifts, they had not seen each other since 1955 (and never would again) and disagreements between them tended to fester. There were a number of issues, but the key to all of them was Viola’s continuing, though intermittently expressed, belief that Don was secretly working on the American Revolution and planned to upstage her own manuscript by taking advantage of her research. After it had lain dormant since 1955, this question had emerged again in 1964. Don had been a supporter of John F. Kennedy, for whom he had campaigned in 1960, and in Viola’s eyes this made matters worse by linking him with ‘the historians of the New Frontier.’102 Don then made the mistake of renewing his offer to underwrite a publication subsidy for her manuscript. ‘I hate to think of your volumes not being published,’ he wrote in 1965, ‘both for your sake and for that of American historical scholarship on this period.’103 Viola’s response was the same as ten years before – she rejected the offer and questioned his motives – and the issue simmered on. In the meantime, Don’s health began to fail after he was injured in a fall in 1971. Soon, however, Viola was again accusing him of having designs on her research, and it was his responses in 1973 to this often-repeated charge that she regarded as ‘hysterical.’104 Only two days after thus expressing concern about him, she came up with a new allegation. She was now convinced that he was the ‘English historian,’ the

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anonymous reader she believed had allowed the plagiarism of her manuscript in 1960. This she put directly to him in a bitter, three-line note. ‘In disillusionment,’ she signed it.105 Viola received no reply from Don, nor from Yale University Press, when she wrote asking for verification of her sudden insight, which she attributed to her careful rereading of Don’s letters. She interpreted the silence as confirming all that she alleged, and concluded further that Don must be a leading member of the group of Kennedy-era intellectuals who were plotting the overthrow of the national constitution and might very well succeed. The Watergate affair, she was inclined to believe, represented the Nixon administration’s understandable effort to find out just what the ‘democratic extremists’ were planning.106 That her allconsuming suspicions had now, to all appearances, wrecked her relationship with Don was a grievous self-inflicted blow. Since the death of their brother Frank in 1960, he had been her closest living relative. While troubled at times, theirs had been a special bond that had endured since before the turn of the century. Fortunately for them both, it proved capable even now of a regeneration of sorts. Ruth Emery, a friend from the Berkshire group who also knew Don, observed to Viola that ‘you both have reason to be proud of each other, proud that your family produced two such fine scholars.’107 What eventually made the difference was not mutual pride but Don’s suffering a stroke in early 1974. Hearing of it through their niece Elizabeth, and learning later that he had lost most of his eyesight, Viola sent him a series of encouraging letters.108 Professional matters intruded little into this correspondence, and an allusion by Don to rivalry between them brought from Viola only the comment that they had ‘each excelled in our own lives and fields.’109 To a friend, she expressed the hope that Don might eventually be able to continue his research with the aid of a reader and a typist. Never fully recovering his health, however, Don died in early 1975.110 Physically unable to travel to Cleveland for Don’s memorial service, Viola experienced what she described to a friend as ‘a nervous breakdown.’ During this period, friction arose even with Miff, whose own brother had also recently died. However, they were quickly reconciled, putting the whole thing down to ‘our sad brother experiences.’111 By July 1975, Viola seemed to one Mount Holyoke administrator ‘to be herself, more or less,’ and by the autumn she had recovered.112 In the meantime, Anne Carey Edmonds, the college librarian, and William McFeely had been leading a new effort to find a publisher for the manuscript. Although Houghton Mifflin expressed interest, the major obsta-

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cle was still Barnes’s refusal to consider editorial changes, and the matter soon lapsed again.113 By now, her physical health was in decline. Frail as she was, she attended the college commencement and its surrounding events in May 1977, escorted by Edmonds. ‘What a wonderful time I had those two days,’ she recorded afterwards.114 Some months later she moved to a nursing home, where she died on 26 July 1979. She was a month and two days short of her ninety-fourth birthday. Among the provisions of her will, Viola Barnes left $20,000 to subsidize the publication of her manuscript, but with a time limit of three years. Stanley Katz, along with William McFeely and Joseph Ellis of Mount Holyoke, formed a committee to try to place the manuscript with a publisher. Edmund S. Morgan gave strong support, and the University Press of New England seemed for a time to be a likely prospect. Soon, however, an old problem arose in a new form. Revision in the light of more recent scholarship would have made the manuscript more publishable, but the committee worried about the dilution of Barnes’s authorship this would involve and in any case lacked a person familiar enough with her research to be able to carry the matter through.115 Eventually time ran out, and the manuscript remained at Mount Holyoke along with Barnes’s other papers. Her collection of rare books, including a number of eighteenth-century items she had acquired during her sojourns in London, went to Yale. It was, as Katz pointed out, an appropriate placement: ‘Although she had many of the insecurities of one who has never been invited back to alma mater, Vi Barnes lived for Yale emotionally.’116 Tributes were paid at Barnes’s memorial service on 16 August 1979 and at Mount Holyoke after the academic year began. Less formal but just as poignant were the words of her life partner and executor, Miff, as she contemplated Viola’s absence: ‘There are still Viola’s personal things to dispose of, her clothing, her furniture, objet[s] d’art and I am also involved in the sale of the house, so there is not too much relaxation for me for awhile. However, this does not worry me. What worries me is my future. After all this excitement of settling her affairs, what then? Life will be dull.’117 Viola Barnes’s final years had combined extraordinary physical vigour with recurring mental and emotional turmoils. The corrosive influence of her mistrust had extended its reach over time. It always centred on the rejection of her manuscript, although with time even that became a metaphor for a pervasive suspicion that supported the notion of a plot large and complex enough that its supposed activities ranged from postcolo-

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nial Africa to the peaceful streets of South Hadley. Friends of long standing, professional colleagues who wished her well, and the closest of her relatives were identified one by one as agents of the indefinable force that tormented her. The consequences were not only personal, in the attrition of relationships that could have been profoundly sustaining during her later years, but extended also to the realm of ideas that was so crucial to her continuing professional life. As a historian she remained alert and industrious, completing her three-volume manuscript to her satisfaction only when she was approaching eighty-five years of age, and tinkering with it until she was past ninety. Her faith in the objective authority of manuscript sources, however, had hardened by that time into an inflexible doctrine that prevented her from any longer recognizing either the dynamism of historiography or the humanity of the dialogue between historian and source. Although there were younger historians whose work she admired, the search for new ways of seeing the past – which had so characterized her own work in earlier days – could now all too easily be seen as evidence of declension (an ironic perception for a historian so unfriendly to New England Puritans) or as part of a covert process of subversion. Yet, by her own testimony at age eighty-six, she had lived a happy old age. For Viola Barnes there always remained areas of strength and security within which her life could flourish untainted by the threatening influences outside. Her domestic life in association with Miff was the most consistent of these. But her humour and vitality also enabled her to continue making and retaining friendships, often – though not exclusively – from the ranks of those who were enlisted with her in her ‘favorite crusades.’ It was characteristic that she was suspicious both of maleorchestrated discrimination and of modern feminism – but the women scholars she met at the Berkshire Conference in her later years impressed her just as deeply in their own way as had her contemporaries. Similarly, historians and their work could still interest and even delight her, as long as they did not cross the shifting line that marked off the insurgent forces she saw as menacing her work and her professional values. Barnes led, in her own mind, a beleaguered life during her final years. Within her remaining strongholds, however, she lived it fully.

CH APTE R 7

Conclusion

Viola Barnes was no paragon. Many of those she encountered found her prickly, touchy, and difficult. The prejudices to which she gave vent at times were unattractive. During her later years, her suspicions and her prejudices tended to harden and combine. Her complaints and denunciations levied a substantial cost on the emotional energy of others, especially if they were friends or relatives. She, of course, also paid a price. Throughout her life, her health and her temperament influenced one another. Her physical health problems, the greatest being her encounter with cancer in 1920, contributed to the insecurities that plagued her. Her temperamental volatility contributed in turn to physical illnesses such as the digestive symptoms from which she repeatedly suffered. Not that Barnes’s ailments and anxieties defined her life. There were always significant areas into which these troubles either did not intrude or in which she dealt with them inconspicuously. Yet her life cannot be fully assessed without acknowledging and accounting for the stresses and conflicts that complicated it so often. In every respect, Viola Barnes’s was a gendered life. She emerged into early adulthood already showing signs of a mercurial nature that was no doubt traceable in part to her close but volatile relationship with a demanding father. At the same time, she showed promise both creatively as a composer of music and academically in literary and historical studies. That she carried these attainments forward and made a career of them as writer and scholar owed much to her appreciation of the advantages of separate female institutions. At the University of Nebraska, her involvements in Kappa Kappa Gamma, the Black Masque, and the College Equal Suffrage League not only helped her to gain the strength of her convictions but also made Louise Pound a close and effective mentor.

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When she went to Yale, these were the influences that enabled her to meet gender discrimination head on, and win advances in some areas on behalf of women graduate students. Viola Barnes the suffragist resisted being defined as a feminist – or, at least, explicitly so. She continued to show affinities with Rosalind Rosenberg’s ‘privatized form’ of feminism through her efforts to promote the advancement and security of women historians.1 The Berkshire Conference was a prime vehicle for doing so, whether in its explicit campaigns for exchange opportunities for women, in its provision of a space for women scholars at the American Historical Association meetings, or simply in the network it provided for recruiting women for available employment. In this context, gender issues represented for Barnes both a challenge and the source of a satisfying commitment that she shared with like-minded women colleagues. Early in her career, however, Barnes also met with less-welcome consequences of her role as a female academic. Overt gender discrimination she experienced only occasionally. However, after she had given up her position at the University of Nebraska in 1919, she faced serious uncertainties in the difficult employment climate for women historians during the 1920s. Paradoxically, her difficulties were compounded by her situation at Mount Holyoke. Although, on the face of it, Mount Holyoke as a distinctly female institution should have provided a secure environment, Barnes had difficulty establishing herself there. In Nellie Neilson and Bertha Putnam, she encountered colleagues who differed drastically from her not only in age and experience but also in social class. Her discomfort, and the additional fragility of her personal relationship with Neilson, made for a precarious footing during her first eight years, and affected her departmental role for years thereafter. To compound matters, her vulnerability as a young, female scholar to the appropriation of her research findings gave her further reason for wariness. As an individual, the young Viola Barnes already had difficulty in maintaining the ability to trust others, even (perhaps especially) those close to her. This trait could only be aggravated by her experience as a junior academic woman during the 1920s. During the following decade, as Barnes moved towards and beyond the age of fifty, her private life underwent profound changes. The deaths in quick succession of her parents and her only sister, and later that of a sister-in-law, imposed an emotional strain with which she was ill equipped to cope. It expressed itself in part through tensions with other family members, which led eventually to the souring of her visit to Nebraska to receive her honorary degree in 1941. Although she lived for

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thirty-eight more years, and later re-established contact with her relatives, she never went back. In 1935, however, she had set up house with Mildred Howard and thus solidified the partnership that was to sustain her through the reminder of her life. Barnes was no admirer of the emotional friendships between women that she had observed during her earlier years at Mount Holyoke, especially if they became vehicles for the social or academic advancement of the more junior partner. She and Miff, however, were established and independent women. Although they were forthright with their shared affection, there was no sign of the fey or precious elements that (rightly or wrongly) she attributed to the relationships of others, and notably of her seniors at Mount Holyoke. Miff, by contrast, was always at the centre of a stable and generally harmonious domestic setting. Teaching too was a source of joy, and by all accounts Viola Barnes was good at it. From her early Mount Holyoke years as a refreshingly unconventional young scholar who related easily to those she taught, to the later years when she took pleasure in being the ‘traffic cop’ who directed the intellectual energies of bright young women into productive channels, Barnes relished the classroom and the students. But she did not relish her departmental colleagues. Although her lack of success as department chair during the early 1940s resulted partly from outside pressures, her own mistrust and prejudices contributed notably as well. It was true that she stood firmly for principles which she had consistently followed over the years, and especially for the preservation of the department as a hospitable place for female scholars. However, she could also be a cantankerous, difficult colleague – as more than one of the younger women who joined the department in the 1940s came to know all too well. Her retirement in 1952, while publicly lamented for depriving the department of an able scholar and a strong teacher – both of which she was – must have brought, conversely, some private expressions of relief. For Barnes herself, participation in the department and in the larger politics of the college had brought out the more prickly and irascible traits that her career had fostered in her. Her career, however, was also that of a researcher and writer. She enjoyed success and recognition in these roles well into the 1930s and in some respects beyond. Her book on the Dominion of New England was well received, and it was followed by a succession of substantial and promising articles. Recognition came in the form of a series of prestigious overseas fellowships, membership in American Historical Association committees and in the Royal Historical Society, her naming among

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Carrie Chapman Catt’s outstanding career women, and in 1941 her honorary degree. Also by this time she had her new book manuscript almost ready for publication and was working on a textbook. Yet as matters turned out, other than the reprint of The Dominion of New England in 1960, she never had a major publication after 1931. Thus, from being an established and still-thriving leader in her field she gradually came to be seen as a scholar overshadowed by others and eventually as a survivor from a bygone era. This despite never losing her drive to succeed and remaining, at least into her late seventies, an interpretive historian of rare quality. Why so? It would be easy enough, and accurate to an extent, to attribute her declining productivity and the disappointment it caused her to her own personal shortcomings. Publishers, and their scholarly advisers, found her no easier to get along with than did her departmental colleagues. She was intensely suspicious of criticism, fiercely protective of her methodology, and in her final years convinced of the existence of a far-flung conspiracy to suppress her work. These apprehensions caused her to forfeit repeated opportunities to have published at least the first volume of her trilogy on British policy in the period of the American Revolution. It was a measure of her state of mind that the same suspicions dealt a near-fatal blow to the relationship with her brother Don that, though not untroubled over the years, had persisted since his infancy in the 1890s. Viola, as Don had noticed and warned on occasion, had given indications that psychologists of a later era might have associated with mood and personality disorders. The changeability of her demeanour had been observed in Don’s letters going back to graduate student days. And there can have been few of those who dealt with Viola Barnes professionally during the last twenty years of her life who did not ponder the word ‘paranoid’ as they attempted to understand her anxieties. These characteristics were intensely personal and particular to Barnes herself. Yet they also arose from hard experience. The threats to her professional future that she encountered during the 1920s were not figments of paranoia, but were all too real. Some might have left those travails behind when security and recognition took their place, but Viola Barnes could not do so. Her mistrust was already rooted, and threats – even real ones – embedded it more deeply in her soul. Family tensions were both symptom and additional cause of this continuing process. Following the delays and diversions of the 1940s, she was finally ready at the time of her retirement to mount the final push for publication of the work she

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regarded as her masterpiece. At this point, however, she faced two unwelcome and related developments. One was that early American scholarship had struck out in directions far removed from the ‘imperial school,’ and showed every sign of continuing to do so. The other was the masculinization of the profession that had followed the Second World War. Not only did women scholars encounter renewed difficulties in everything from having their work taken seriously to being able to take a drink in male company in a faculty-club lounge. Old stereotypes that saw academic women as petulant, shrill, and moody had to be confronted as well. To make Barnes conform to any such typecasting would have been a Procrustean task at best. Yet there was enough in her disposition to enable unflattering conclusions to be drawn. Idiosyncracies that might have been acceptable and even endearing in a masculine context were much less forgivable in an ageing and sometimes verbose female defender of ‘imperial school’ methodology. Moreover, Barnes’s personal history ensured that her response would be, first, instinctively to mistrust, and second to become ever more protective of her work and of the objective view of the colonial and revolutionary past that she believed it embodied. Thus, her very practice of her profession was drawn into the complex of reactions and counter-reactions that had been created by the combination of her personal characteristics with her gender experience. Her protectiveness made out of the ‘imperial school’ methodology a rigid rejection of secondary-source materials that she herself would not have recognized during her productive years. The way in which she defined the acquisition of historical knowledge also hardened into a doctrine. Her portrayals of, say, George III or John Wilkes, were filtered through her own view of the world. Even the language she used to describe them – George III ‘aimed to improve and inspire his people,’ for example, while ‘Wilkes and the reformers depended on propaganda for the strength of whatever cause they were supporting’2 – provided clear illustrations of her perspective. Such judgments, which were pervasive in her later work, might well have carried weight if explicitly recognized as products of what E.H. Carr famously defined as history’s ‘unending dialogue between the present and the past.’3 In the context of her rigid duality between objectivity and relativism, however, they were simply unsupportable. More than that, these and other controvertible elements of her work were not even open for discussion. Because they were, for her, the result of an objective approach, it followed that suggestions for revision must be based on a dangerous and offensive relativism – or,

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worse still, motivated by a deliberate effort to misrepresent the past for nefarious purposes. Yet there was an essential sense in which Viola Barnes was true to herself. It was her core belief that able women researchers, like women proficient in other occupations, should be able to compete effectively with men. For herself, this meant that she must succeed in such crowded fields as early New England history and the history of the Revolution. Through happenstance, her timing was poor. Establishing herself during the 1920s, she operated in a climate where women were losing ground to men in academic employment. Completing her manuscript in the 1950s, she contended with an even more conspicuous and unapologetic masculine tide. Her own success during the interwar years had entrenched in her the political belief that socialism and special pleading were the enemies of individual self-direction, and she deplored them accordingly. Similarly, she saw the future of academic and professional women as depending on an aggregate of individual advances rather than on a collective strategy to bring about radical change. At the same time, Barnes knew from her experiences going back to student days – and had learned from Louise Pound – that separate women’s organizations could provide an essential platform for ambitious women. Hence her commitment to the Berkshire Conference, and her efforts during the interwar era to make it an effective network in enabling younger academic women to make their mark. By the 1950s, her circumstances had changed. Now it was Barnes who, ageing and historiographically unfashionable, had to struggle all over again to make her own mark. Although she was increasingly convinced that she was opposed by a powerful conspiracy, her rules of engagement remained consistent with the strategies she had always advocated. Seeking and receiving support from long-standing Berkshire Conference colleagues, she continued steadily to claim her scholarly due even in the face of rude or patronizing treatment. It is in this historical context that the seeming contradiction of Barnes’s later years – the coexistence of her zest for living with her belief that she faced a threatening conspiracy – emerges as a true paradox, an inconsistency that is apparent rather than real. Much as she needed to have the firm foundations provided by friendships and domestic stability, the battles she waged against the critics of her work (even the benevolent ones) were sustaining rather than destructive. That she could write a long letter of complaint and then enjoy a faculty-club reception, or that she could denounce a fellow-historian only to greet the same person

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cordially later in the day, was not so much an inconsistency as an indication of differing but complementary ways of asserting her personal and professional worth. The real fault lines lay elsewhere. She was acutely conscious that the recognition she craved to the end of her life – that of being acknowledged as an important, working historian – was slipping away. The respect still generated by her earlier work was real and durable, but it was not fully satisfying. Barnes had achieved much in her long life, in her profession and elsewhere. She had resisted gender-related and other obstacles tenaciously. In doing so, however, she had entrenched characteristics in herself that ultimately became counterproductive. Her continuing efforts to resist the obstacles she perceived late in life were essential to the maintenance of her integrity as she saw it, but at the same time they were guaranteed to hold her back from the acceptance she coveted from others. If there was a ‘personal tragedy’ in Viola Barnes’s life, this was it. But it never did crush her spirit.

Notes

Preface 1 Viola Florence Barnes, The Dominion of New England: A Study in British Colonial Policy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1923; repr. New York: Frederick Ungar Publishing Co., 1960). 2 Viola Barnes to Ruth Roettinger, 7 March 1968, Mount Holyoke College Archives and Special Collections (hereafter MHCA), Viola Florence Barnes Papers (hereafter VBP), series VIII, folder 14 (form of citation hereafter VIII:14). 3 John G. Reid, ‘Change and Continuity in Nova Scotia, 1758–1775,’ in Margaret Conrad, ed., Making Adjustments: Change and Continuity in Planter Nova Scotia, 1759–1800 (Fredericton, NB: Acadiensis Press, 1991), 46. 4 Emerson W. Baker and John G. Reid, The New England Knight: Sir William Phips, 1651–1695 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1998), xiv. 5 See Richard R. Johnson, ‘Charles McLean Andrews and the Invention of American Colonial History,’ William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 43 (1986), 532–3, including citation of Ian K. Steele. 6 Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, ‘The Female World of Love and Ritual: Relations between Women in Nineteenth-Century America,’ Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 1 (1975–6), 1–29. 7 Gerda Lerner, ‘New Approaches to the Study of Women in American History,’ in Berenice A. Carroll, ed., Liberating Women’s History: Theoretical and Critical Essays (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1976), 350–6. 8 Estelle Freedman, ‘Separatism as Strategy: Female Institution Building and American Feminism, 1870–1930,’ Feminist Studies 3 (Fall 1979), 512–29; Freedman, ‘Separatism Revisited: Women’s Institutions, Social Reform, and the Career of Miriam Van Waters,’ in Linda K. Kerber, Alice Kessler-Harris,

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9 10

11

12

13

14

Notes to pages xv–xvi

and Kathryn Kish Sklar, eds, U.S. History as Women’s History: New Feminist Essays (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995), 173. Rosalind Rosenberg, Beyond Separate Spheres: Intellectual Roots of Modern Feminism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982), esp. 110–13, 239–40. R. Rosenberg, Divided Lives: American Women in the Twentieth Century (New York: Hill and Wang, 1992), esp. 91–3. See also Nancy F. Cott, The Grounding of Modern Feminism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987). Susan Ware, Holding Their Own: American Women in the 1930s (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1982), 62–6; Cott, The Grounding of Modern Feminism, 45, 159ff.; Rosenberg, Divided Lives, 92–3. See also the earlier study of Linda Gordon, Woman’s Body, Woman’s Right: A Social History of Birth Control in America (New York: Grossman Press, 1976), 192–4. Leila J. Rupp and Verta Taylor, Survival in the Doldrums: The American Women’s Rights Movement, 1945 to the 1960s (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 97–108. See also Rupp, Worlds of Women: The Making of an International Women’s Movement (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), 96–101; Elaine Tyler May, Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era ([New York]: BasicBooks, 1988), 94–6; and Lynne Segal, Straight Sex: Rethinking the Politics of Pleasure (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 49–55. Penina Migdal Glazier and Miriam Slater, Unequal Colleagues: The Entrance of Women into the Professions, 1890–1940 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1987), esp. 240–2. Studies of specific professions included Regina Markell Morantz-Sanchez, Sympathy and Science: Women Physicians in American Medicine (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985) and Robyn Muncy, Creating a Female Dominion in American Reform, 1890– 1935 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991). Margaret Rossiter, ‘Doctorates for American Women, 1868–1907,’ History of Education Quarterly 22 (1982), 159–83. Discussions of these and other themes relevant to the study of professional women academics were also found in more general works on gender and higher education, including Roberta Frankfort, Collegiate Women: Domesticity and Career in Turn-ofthe-Century America (New York: New York University Press, 1977); Lynn D. Gordon, Gender and Higher Education in the Progressive Era (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990); Barbara Miller Solomon, In the Company of Educated Women: A History of Women and Higher Education in America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985), esp. 99–100, 135; and Bette Weneck, ‘Social and Cultural Stratification in Women’s Higher Education: Barnard College and Teachers College, 1898–1912,’ History of Education Quarterly 31 (1991), 1–25.

Notes to pages xvi–xviii

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15 Jessie Bernard, Academic Women (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1964), 31–53; Patricia Albjerg Graham, ‘Expansion and Exclusion: A History of Women in American Higher Education,’ Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 3 (1977–8), 759–73; Susan B. Carter, ‘Academic Women Revisited: An Empirical Study of Changing Patterns in Women’s Employment as College and University Faculty, 1890–1963,’ Journal of Social History 14 (1981), 677–99. 16 Margaret W. Rossiter, Women Scientists in America: Struggles and Strategies to 1940 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982); Rossiter, Women Scientists in America before Affirmative Action, 1940–1972 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995). 17 Carole B. Shmurak and Bonnie S. Handler, ‘“Castle of Science”: Mount Holyoke College and the Preparation of Women in Chemistry, 1837–1941,’ History of Education Quarterly 32 (1992), 315–42; Mary Ann Dzuback, ‘Women and Social Research at Bryn Mawr College, 1915–40,’ History of Education Quarterly 33 (1993), 579–608; Dzuback, ‘Gender and the Politics of Knowledge,’ History of Education Quarterly 43 (2003), 171–95. 18 Patricia A. Palmieri, ‘Here Was Fellowship: A Social Portrait of Academic Women at Wellesley College, 1895–1920,’ History of Education Quarterly 23 (1983), 195–214; Palmieri, In Adamless Eden: The Community of Women Faculty at Wellesley (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995). 19 Kathryn Kish Sklar, ‘American Female Historians in Context, 1770–1930,’ Feminist Studies 3:1–2 (1975–6), 171–84; Susan Mosher Stuard, ‘A New Dimension? North American Scholars Contribute Their Perspective,’ in Stuard, ed., Women in Medieval History and Historiography (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1987), 81–99. 20 Margaret Hastings and Elisabeth G. Kimball, ‘Two Distinguished Medievalists: Nellie Neilson and Bertha Putnam,’ Journal of British Studies 18 (1979), 142–59. See also Gerald Vaughan, ‘The Enigma of Mount Holyoke’s Nellie Neilson,’ Historical Journal of Massachusetts 28 (2000), 186–212. 21 Glazier and Slater, Unequal Colleagues, esp. 43–9; Jacqueline Goggin, ‘Challenging Sexual Discrimination in the Historical Profession: Women Historians and the American Historical Association, 1890–1940,’ American Historical Review 97 (1992), 769–802. 22 Arthur C. Cole, A Hundred Years of Mount Holyoke College: The Evolution of an Educational Ideal (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1940); Anne Carey Edmonds, A Memory Book: Mount Holyoke College 1837–1987 (South Hadley, MA: Mount Holyoke College, 1988). 23 Anna Mary Wells, Miss Marks and Miss Woolley (Boston: Houghton Mifflin,

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25

26

27

28

29

30

31

32

Notes to pages xviii–xx

1978); Elaine Kendall, ‘Peculiar Institutions’: An Informal History of the Seven Sisters Colleges (New York: Putnam, [1976]). Deborah M. Olsen, ‘Remaking the Image: Promotional Literature of Mount Holyoke, Smith, and Wellesley Colleges in the Mid-to-Late 1940s,’ History of Education Quarterly 40 (2000), 418–59. Helen Lefkovitz Horowitz, Alma Mater: Design and Experience in the Women’s Colleges from Their Nineteenth-Century Beginnings to the 1930s (Boston: Beacon Press, 1986; 2nd ed., Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1993). For a general treatment encompassing an extended period, see Nina Baym, American Women Writers and the Work of History, 1790–1860 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1995). Among works illustrating the more specific chronologies are two that dealt with comparable developments outside the United States: Beverly Boutilier and Alison Prentice, eds, Creating Historical Memory: English-Canadian Women and the Work of History (Vancouver: UBC Press, 1997), 4; and Maxine Berg, ‘The First Women Economic Historians,’ Economic History Review 45 (1992), 308–29. Joan Wallach Scott, Gender and the Politics of History (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), esp. 1–11, 178–98. See also Judith P. Zinsser, History and Feminism: A Glass Half Full (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1993); and Linda K. Kerber, ‘Gender,’ in Anthony Molho and Gordon S. Wood, eds, Imagined Histories: American Historians Interpret the Past (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998), esp. 42–3. Bonnie G. Smith, The Gender of History: Men, Women, and Historical Practice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), esp. 1–13, 185–212. See also Natalie Zemon Davis, ‘History’s Two Bodies,’ American Historical Review 93 (1988), 1–13; and Nancy F. Cott, ed., A Woman Making History: Mary Ritter Beard through Her Letters (New Haven: Yale University Press), 1–62. Julie Des Jardins, Women and the Historical Enterprise in America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003), esp. 1–9, 31–3, 77–8, 217– 40. Peter Novick, That Noble Dream: The ‘Objectivity Question’ and the American Historical Profession (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988). Linda Gordon, ‘Comments on That Noble Dream,’ American Historical Review 96 (1991), 683–7; Hilda L. Smith, Review of Peter Novick, That Noble Dream in Journal of Women’s History 4 (1992), 133–41. Ellen Fitzpatrick, History’s Memory: Writing America’s Past, 1880–1980 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), esp. 1–12, 252.

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33 A.S. Eisenstadt, Charles McLean Andrews: A Study in American Historical Writing (New York: Columbia University Press, 1956); Johnson, ‘Charles McLean Andrews and the Invention of American Colonial History,’ 519–41. See also Dorothy Ross, The Origins of American Social Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 257–88. 34 Sara Alpern, Joyce Antler, Elisabeth Israels Perry, and Ingrid Winther Scobie, eds, The Challenge of Feminist Biography (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1992), 7–9. See also Susan Mann Trofimenkoff, ‘Feminist Biography,’ Atlantis: A Women’s Studies Journal / Journal d’études sur la femme 10:2 (1995), 1–9. 35 Barbara Caine, ‘Feminist Biography and Feminist History,’ Women’s History Review 3 (1994), 253. 36 Louise Fargo Brown, Apostle of Democracy: The Life of Lucy Maynard Salmon (New York: Harper, 1943). 37 Joyce Antler, Lucy Sprague Mitchell: The Making of a Modern Woman (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987); Jean Barman, Constance Lindsay Skinner: Writing on the Frontier (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002); Ruth Bordin, Alice Freeman Palmer: The Evolution of a New Woman (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993); Frances H. Early, ‘Revolutionary Pacifism and War Resistance: Jessie Wallace Hughan’s “War against War,”’ Peace and Change 20 (1995), 307–28; Estelle B. Freedman, Maternal Justice: Miriam Van Waters and the Female Reform Tradition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996); Helen Lefkovitz Horowitz, The Power and Passion of M. Carey Thomas (New York: Knopf, 1994); Barbara Roberts, A Reconstructed World: A Feminist Biography of Gertrude Richardson (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1996); Andrea Walton, ‘“Scholar,” “Lady,” “Best Man in the English Department”? – Recalling the Career of Marjorie Hope Nicolson,’ History of Education Quarterly 40 (2000), 169–200. Chapter 1 ‘I desire that my children be strong and forceful’ 1 Cass Barns to Viola Barns (hereafter VB), 23 January 1903, VBP, I:7. 2 VB to Caroline Robbins, 22 May 1967, VBP, VIII:13. 3 Cass Barns to Mrs B.A. Davis, 11 December 1885, Library/Archives Division, Nebraska State Historical Society (hereafter NSHS), Barnes (Barns) Family Papers, 4009 (hereafter BFP), series I, folder 2 (form of citation hereafter I:2); Cass Grove Barns, Nebraska Pioneer: Memoirs of Cass Grove Barns, M.D. ([Lincoln, NE]: Privately published, [1971]), 41–2; Barnes Family Genealogy, VBP, I:1.

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Notes to pages 4–8

4 See Boone County Historical Society, History of Boone County, Nebraska, 1871–1986 (Dallas: Curtis Media Corp., 1986), 6–12. 5 Barns, Nebraska Pioneer, 62. On the native history of this area, see James C. Olson and Ronald C. Naugle, History of Nebraska, 3rd ed. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1997), 18–26, 117–22; also History of Boone County, 39–41. 6 Cass G. Barns, The Sod House: Reminiscent Historical and Biographical Sketches Featuring Nebraska Pioneers, 1867–1897 (Madison, NE: Privately published, 1930), 72; Barns, Nebraska Pioneer, 62–3. 7 Barns, Nebraska Pioneer, 66. 8 Ibid., 49–65. 9 Ibid., 61–5. 10 See Albion Argus (hereafter Argus), 25 March, 1 April 1898. 11 Ibid., 26 February, 23 April 1897, 1 and 8 September 1899, 23 February 1900; Barns, Nebraska Pioneer, 74–5, 82–105. 12 Barns, Nebraska Pioneer, 66–75; Argus, 17 July 1896; Addison Erwin Sheldon, Nebraska: The Land and the People, 3 vols. (Chicago and New York: Lewis Publishing Co., 1931), 2: 129–30. 13 Cass Barns to VB, 3 March 1903, VBP, I:7. 14 See obituary notices, BFP, IV:4. On women’s roles in Nebraska and more generally at this time, see [Governor’s Commission on the Status of Women], Nebraska Women Through the Years, 1867–1967 (Lincoln, NE: Johnsen Publishing Co., 1967), 9–28, and Rosenberg, Divided Lives, 10–17. 15 See Isabella Barns to VB, 19 July 1914, BFP, I:11, and 3 February 1935, VBP, I:13. 16 VB, ‘The Quest’ (autobiographical manuscript), VBP, VII:32. 17 Isabella Barns to VB, 19 July 1914, BFP, I:11. 18 History of Boone County, 688. 19 Argus, Supplement, [16 May 1902]. 20 History of Boone County, 690–1; Argus, 4 September 1896, 24 November 1899, 20 December 1901. 21 See Richard E. Dudley, ‘Nebraska Public School Education, 1890–1910,’ Nebraska History, 54 (1973), 65–90. 22 Argus, 25 May 1900. 23 Ruby Barns to VB, 1 February 1903, VBP, I:56. 24 Autograph album, 1891–1901, BFP, series IV, box 4, loose items; Louise Pound to VB, 23 March 1930, VBP, IV:32; VB to Elizabeth Waugh Brownlee, 12 February 1957, VBP, VIII:9. School reports, with rankings based on attendance, punctuality, deportment, and scholarship, were published monthly and annually in town newspapers. See, for example, Albion Argus, 11 June 1897.

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25 See Boone County History, 733; Argus, 24 July 1896. 26 Argus, 30 August, 13 September 1901. 27 Ibid., 23 April, 14 December 1900. The Shakespeare production in December 1900 was The Merchant of Venice; on popular Shakespeare, see Lawrence W. Levine, ‘William Shakespeare and the American People: A Study in Cultural Transformation,’ in Levine, The Unpredictable Past: Explorations in American Cultural History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 139–71. 28 Argus, 5 August 1898, 7 April, 18 August 1899, 9 and 16 February 1900. On the Exposition, see Olson and Naugle, History of Nebraska, 250–2. 29 Argus, 26 March, 2 April 1897, 13 April, 6 July 1900. 30 Ibid., 4 August 1899; on the contrasting experience of nearby rural children, see Elliott West, ‘Children on the Plains Frontier,’ in Elliott West and Paula Petrik, eds, Small Worlds: Children and Adolescents in America, 1850–1950 (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1992), 26–41. 31 VB, ‘My Early Life’ (autobiographical manuscript), VBP, VII:32. A decade earlier, another small-town Nebraskan girl, Edith Abbott, who would later attend the University of Nebraska and go on to become a leading social scientist and Progressive reformer, had similarly aspired to begin her formal education at an unusually early age – in her case at only three years old. See Ellen Fitzpatrick, Endless Crusade: Women Social Scientists and Progressive Reform (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 22–3. 32 VB to Frank Barns, 30 June 1958, VBP, VIII:9. 33 Barns, Nebraska Pioneer, 73; Argus, 10 June 1898, 24 May 1901. 34 Argus, 24 May 1901. 35 VB, ‘Professional Career’ (autobiographical manuscript), VBP, VII:32. 36 Ibid. 37 Ibid.; VB, ‘Preface’ to Barns, Nebraska Pioneer, 4. 38 VB to Ruth [Johnson], 2 July 1969, VBP, VIII:14; VB to [Blanche], 20 December 1958, VBP, VIII:9. 39 James L. McKee, Lincoln, the Prairie Capital: An Illustrated History (Woodland Hills, CA: Windsor Publications, 1984), 84–5. 40 See Letter Album, 1903, BFP, series IV, box 4, loose items. 41 Cass Barns to VB, 8 September 1902, VBP, I:7; Ruby Barns to VB, 7 September 1902, BFP, I:3; Donald Barns to VB, 7 September 1902, ibid. 42 University of Nebraska, Catalogue, 1903–4, 405; University of Nebraska School of Music, Yearbook, 1904–5, Archives of University of Nebraska– Lincoln (hereafter UNLA), RG13/8/6. 43 Laura Palmquist to VB, [1903], BFP, series IV, box 4, loose items; Margaret Ashford Packard to VB, [14 June 1938], VBP, VII:8.

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Notes to pages 12–16

44 Ruth [Johnson] to VB, [9 October 1906], BFP, I:9. See also Smith-Rosenberg, ‘The Female World of Love and Ritual’; and Solomon, In the Company of Educated Women, 99–100. 45 Ruth [Johnson] to VB, 1 July 1903, VBP, II:20; Ruth [Johnson] to VB, [9 October 1906], BFP, I:9. 46 Cass Barns to VB, 29 October 1902, BFP, I:4. On dancing as a leisure pursuit of turn-of-the-century adolescents and young adults, and middle-class disapproval, see Kathy Peiss, Cheap Amusements: Working Women and Leisure in Turn-of-the-Century New York (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1986), 88–114. 47 Cass Barns to VB, 3 March 1903, VBP, I:7. 48 Ruth [Johnson] to VB, n.d., BFP, III:51; VB to [Blanche], 20 December 1958, VBP, VIII:9. 49 VB to [Blanche], 20 December 1958, VBP, VIII:9. 50 VB to Frank Barns, 14 December 1958, VBP, VIII:9. 51 Transcript, 1903–16, BFP, IV:1. 52 VB to [Blanche], 20 December 1958, VBP, VIII:9; Compositions, 1903–6, VBP, II:31, 34, 35; Test in Composition, 9 June 1906, VBP, II:36; Mount Holyoke in the Twentieth Century, vol. 3: Transcript of Interview of Viola Barnes, 9–10 March 1972, 86–7, MHCA (hereafter MHCA, Interview of VB). 53 Barns, Nebraska Pioneer, 76; VB, Preface to Nebraska Pioneer, 4–5; Cass Barns to VB, 3 March 1904, BFP, I:9. 54 Barns, Nebraska Pioneer, 77–8, 91–2. 55 Ruth [Johnson] to VB, BFP, I:6; on the symptoms she later attributed to ‘a spastic colon,’ see VB to Frank Barns, VBP, VIII:9. 56 VB to [Blanche], 20 December 1958, VBP, VIII:9. 57 Ruth [Johnson] to VB, n.d., BFP, III, 51. Although the letter itself is undated, the contents establish that it belongs to the summer of 1906. 58 VB, ‘Professional Career’ (autobiographical manuscript), VBP, VII:32; Barns, Nebraska Pioneer, 78. 59 University of Nebraska, Catalogue, 1907–8, 448; 1908–9, 528; 1909–10, 551. 60 Robert E. Knoll, Prairie University: A History of the University of Nebraska (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1995), 34, and 27–55 passim. 61 University of Nebraska, Catalogue, 1909–10, 551. 62 VB to Mrs Edward T. James, 10 February 1968, VBP, VIII:14. This observation can be compared with the discussions in Rosenberg, Divided Lives, 25– 8, and Solomon, In the Company of Educated Women, 62–71. 63 See Sharon O’Brien, Willa Cather: The Emerging Voice (New York: Oxford

Notes to pages 16–19

64

65 66 67

68 69

70

71

72

73 74 75

175

University Press, 1987), 129–31, and Phyllis C. Robinson, Willa: The Life of Willa Cather (New York: Doubleday, 1983), 57–79. For biographical details on Louise Pound, see UNLA, Louise Pound Papers, RG12/10/15. See also Louise Pound, ‘Graduate Work for Women,’ in Pound, Selected Writings of Louise Pound (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1949), 292–300; and Pound, ‘The College Woman and Research,’ ibid., 309– 13. See also Rossiter, Women Scientists in America: Struggles and Strategies to 1940, 282–5; and Walton, ‘“Scholar,” “Lady,”’ 172–3. On Olivia Pound, see McKee, Lincoln, 76. Transcript, 1903–16, BFP, IV:1; University of Nebraska, Catalogue, 1907–8, 169–74; 1908–9, 224–9. Polk’s Lincoln City Directory, 1908, 64; 1909, 58; VB to Mary O. Barns Pittenger, 24 May 1972, VBP, VIII:15. See also McKee, Lincoln, 76. Cornhusker (Yearbook), 1907, 288–9; 1908, 252–3. See also Robert N. Manley, Centennial History of the University of Nebraska, volume 1, Frontier University (1869–1919) (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1969), 279–80. Cornhusker, 1907, 265; 1908, 258; 1909, 277; Louise Pound, ‘to whom it may concern,’ March 1912, VBP, IV:32. Cornhusker, 1907, 352–3; 1908, 326–7; 1909, 362–3. On the establishment of Kappa Kappa Gamma at the university in 1884, see Louise Pound, ‘Organizations,’ in [Pound, ed.], Semi-Centennial Anniversary Book: The University of Nebraska, 1869–1919 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska, 1919), 61. Cornhusker, 1909, 309; Invitation to VB, n.d., BFP, IV:1; VB to Elizabeth Waugh Brownlee, 7 May 1968, VBP, VIII:14. See also Manley, Frontier University, 281–2. For Viola Barns’s sorority nickname, see the correspondence in VBP, II:8–17. On separate women’s organizations, see Gordon, Gender and Higher Education in the Progressive Era, 40–4; Solomon, In the Company of Educated Women, 94–108; and, more generally, Freedman, ‘Separatism as Strategy,’ 512–29. Daily Nebraskan (Lincoln), 19 February 1908; on the relationship of suffragism and feminism, and the distinction between them, see Cott, The Grounding of Modern Feminism, 3–15. And on Maud Wood Park and the organization of the College Equal Suffrage League, see Horowitz, The Power and Passion of M. Carey Thomas, 400–1. Cornhusker, 1908, 269–70; Daily Nebraskan, 25 February 1908. Daily Nebraskan, 20 March 1908, 29 May 1908; Cornhusker, 1909, 293. VB to [Irma], 8 November 1973, MHCA, Faculty and Staff Papers, Viola F. Barnes, folder 2.

176

Notes to pages 19–22

76 Ibid.; Daily Nebraskan, 13 March 1909. 77 Ruth [Johnson] to VB, [20 June 1907], BFP, I:9; Fred Ballard to VB, VBP, II:7. 78 J. Fred Ballard, ‘The History and Tendency of American Drama’ [MA thesis, University of Nebraska, 1907.] There is no record of the degree being conferred. This copy of the thesis, which shows corrections, looks like a penultimate draft rather than a final version. Why no degree seemingly was conferred for Ballard’s thesis is unclear. On this and other aspects of Ballard’s early life, see Wilma Wolfe Heffelbower, ‘Fred Ballard, Nebraska Playwright,’ MA thesis, University of Nebraska, 1968, 3–7. On the Ballard family, see James L. McKee, Edward F. Zimmer, and Lori K. Jorgenson, Havelock: A Photo History and Walking Tour (Lincoln: J. and L. Lee Co., 1993), 29; also Polk’s Lincoln City Directory, 1905, 198; 1906, 58; 1907, 68. 79 Cornhusker, 1907, 256, 261–3. 80 VB to Elizabeth Waugh Brownlee, 7 May 1968, VBP, VIII:14. 81 [Mildred Howard], Note on Barnes–Ballard correspondence file, VBP, II:7. 82 See Ballard to Pound, 10 June 1919, NSHS, Louise Pound Papers, RG0912, box 1. 83 Ballard to VB, [14 November 1908], [15 February 1909], [August 1909], VBP, II:7; Heffelbower, ‘Fred Ballard,’ 10–12. 84 Daily Nebraskan, 29 March 1908; Ballard to VB, 20 October 1943, VBP, II:7; Ballard to VB, 11 October 1943, ibid.; Heffelbower, ‘Fred Ballard,’ 12– 13. 85 VB to Mary O. Barns Pittenger, 24 May 1972, VBP, VIII:15. On the dilemma presented to professional women by the possibility of marriage, and the different conclusion reached by a contemporary of Barnes, see Antler, Lucy Sprague Mitchell, 135–8, 159–97. 86 Heffelbower, ‘Fred Ballard,’ 17–32; on YMCAs and male companionship, see George Chauncey, Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay World, 1890–1940 (New York: BasicBooks, 1994), 155–8. 87 VB to Mary O. Barns Pittenger, 24 May 1972, VBP, VIII:15. 88 Daily Nebraskan, 6 April 1909. 89 VB to [Irma], 8 November 1973, MHCA, Faculty and Staff Papers, Viola F. Barnes, folder 2. 90 Daily Nebraskan, 6 May 1909; Cornhusker, 1909, 432. 91 Cass Barns to VB, 5 June 1909, BFP, I:10. 92 Viola Florence Barns, ‘The Prometheus Myth in Literature,’ MA thesis, University of Nebraska, 1910, esp. 35–6, 37–8, 56. 93 Transcript, 1903–16, BFP, IV:1; University of Nebraska, Catalogue, 1909– 10, 266–7.

Notes to pages 22–5

177

94 Doris Wood to VB, [7, 29 July 1910], VBP, II:13; [Jessie] to VB, [25 June, 1 August 1910], VBP, II:15; [Alice] to VB, [10 August 1910], VBP, II:17; Florence Riddell to VB, [5 July 1910], VBP, II:12. 95 Transcript, 1903–16, BFP, IV:1; University of Nebraska, Catalogue, 1911– 12, 18, 99, 101. In the same catalogue, p. 62, Barns was also listed as a fellow in English Language and Literature, but subsequent university records indicated that her fellowships for 1910–11 and 1911–12 were held in American history. See Florence I. McGahey (per Mabel R. Hays) to VB, 14 December 1925, BFP, I:31. On the choice between the two, see VB to [Blanche], 20 December 1958, VBP, VIII:9. 96 [Mr and Mrs H.N. Wood] to Kate McHugh, 4 December 1911, VBP, II:25; McHugh to Mr and Mrs Wood, 8 December 1911, VBP, II:25; Louise Pound, ‘to whom it may concern,’ March 1912, VBP, IV:32; Nebraska Teaching Certificate, Viola Florence Barnes, 1 April 1912, VBP, II:25. On the model high school, see Knoll, Prairie University, 54. 97 University of Nebraska, Catalogue, 1911–12, 18, 99, 101; 1912–13, 105, 107; 1913–14, 19, 113, 115; Polk’s Lincoln City Directory, 1912. Barns appears in both the 1911 and 1913 directories. 98 University of Nebraska, Catalogue, 1913–14, 19, 113, 115; 1914–15, 14, 88, 133, 135–6; 1915–16, 15, 82, 358, 360–1. 99 VB to Mrs Edward T. James, 10 February 1968, VBP, VIII:14; on the relationship between the PhD and academic appointments in history, see Novick, That Noble Dream, 47–50. 100 See her notes, in VBP, VI:21; VB to Mrs Edward T. James, 10 February 1968, VBP, VIII:14; also Winfred Trexler Root, Relations of Pennsylvania with the British Government, 1696–1765 ([Philadelphia]: University of Pennsylvania, 1912). Among the recent works of the other authors named were Charles McLean Andrews, Colonial Self-Government, 1652–1689 (New York: Harper, 1904); George Louis Beer, The Old Colonial System, 1660–1754 (New York: Macmillan, 1912); and Herbert Levi Osgood, The American Colonies in the Seventeenth Century, 3 vols. (New York: Macmillan, 1904–7). 101 See those of her notes from the University of Nebraska that have survived, in VBP, II:21. 102 Charles McLean Andrews to VB, 19 September 1915, BFP, I:11. 103 Knoll, University of Nebraska, 64–5; Argus, 26 May 1899; VB to Ruth Johnson, 2 July 1969, VBP, VIII:14. 104 Howard W. Caldwell to VB, 25 January 1916 [sic for 1917], VBP, IV:8; Caldwell to Hanus Oertel, 1 March 1916, Manuscripts and Archives, Yale University Library (hereafter Yale MSSA), YRG, 25–F, RU 262, Graduate School Records, box 16, Viola Barns Admission File.

178

Notes to pages 25–9

105 See Donald Barnes (hereafter DB) to VB, 5 January 1902 [sic for 1903], BFP, I:3. 106 DB to VB, [6 March 1916], BFP, I:16. See also Dzuback, ‘Gender and the Politics of Knowledge,’ 178–80; and Rossiter, ‘Doctorates for American Women,’ 159–83. 107 VB to [Blanche], 20 December 1958, VBP, VIII:9. See also Eisenstadt, Charles McLean Andrews, xvi–xvii, 57; and Johnson, ‘Charles McLean Andrews and the Invention of Colonial History,’ 532–3. On the marriage patterns of women PhDs, see Emilie J. Hutchinson, Women and the Ph.D. (Greensboro: North Carolina College for Women, 1929), 17, 90–8; Solomon, In the Company of Educated Women, 137–8; and Smith, The Gender of History, 189–90. 108 Andrews to VB, 19 September 1915, BFP, I:11; see also Hutchinson, Women and the Ph.D., 32–9. 109 DB to VB, [6 April 1916], BFP, I:17; VB to [Blanche], 20 December 1958, VBP, VIII:9. 110 DB to VB, [4 October 1915], BFP, I:12. 111 DB to VB, [6 December 1915], BFP, I:13; DB to VB, [6 April 1916], BFP, I:17. 112 Cass Barns to VB, 14 April 1916, VBP, I:8. 113 DB to VB, [17 April 1916], BFP, I:17. 114 VB to Cass Barns, 12 April 1916, VBP, VIII:3. 115 Cass Barns to VB, 14 April 1916, VBP, I:8. 116 VB to Cass Barns, [April 1916], VBP, VIII:3. 117 Ibid. 118 See Goggin, ‘Challenging Sexual Discrimination in the Historical Profession,’ 772–5. 119 See Novick, That Noble Dream, 48–9. Chapter 2

‘History is my life work’

1 VB to Andrews, 3 November 1929, Yale MSSA, Charles McLean Andrews Papers, series I, folder 330 (form of citation hereafter I:330). Viola Barnes had altered the spelling of her surname from ‘Barns’ while at Yale. She came to believe that the original dropping of the ‘e’ had been an affectation of her father’s early years and not a long-standing family spelling. See VB to [Gladys], 29 April 1972, VBP, VIII:17. Her brother Donald made the same change while at Harvard. 2 Notestein to VB, 29 June 1927, VBP, IV:2. Notestein was a former suitor and future husband of another female academic with Midwestern origins who

Notes to pages 30–2

3

4 5 6 7 8 9

10 11

12

179

had made her career in New England, Ada Louise Comstock, which may have influenced his opinions on the matter. See Barbara Miller Solomon, From Western Prairies to Eastern Commons, A Life in Education: Ada Louise Comstock, 1876–1973, ed. Susan Ware (N.p.: Estate of Barbara M. Solomon, 1993), 43–5. On male resistance to women’s appointments, see Goggin, ‘Challenging Sexual Discrimination,’ 772–7, and Smith, The Gender of History, 191–4. Charles McLean Andrews and Frances G. Davenport, Guide to the Manuscript Materials for the History of the United States to 1783, in the British Museum, in Minor London Archives, and in the Libraries of Oxford and Cambridge (Washington: Carnegie Institute of Washington, 1908); Andrews, Guide to the Materials for American History to 1783 in the Public Record Office of Great Britain, 2 vols. (Washington: Carnegie Institute of Washington, 1912–14); Andrews, Colonial Self-Government, 1652–1689 (New York: Harper, 1904); Andrews, British Committees, Commissions, and Councils of Trade and Plantations, 1622–1675 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1908); Andrews, The Colonial Period (New York: Holt, 1912). On Andrews’s life and scholarship, see Eisenstadt, Charles McLean Andrews, passim; Johnson, ‘Charles McLean Andrews and the Invention of Colonial History,’ 519–41; and Ross, The Origins of American Social Science, 258–70. See Eisenstadt, Charles McLean Andrews, 29–33, 69–70. Johnson, ‘Charles McLean Andrews and the Invention of Colonial History,’ 528. VB to Bernard Bailyn, 28 July 1966, VBP, VIII:12; Johnson, ‘Charles McLean Andrews and the Invention of Colonial History,’ 528–9. Quoted in Eisenstadt, Charles McLean Andrews, 149, 151. See VBP, IV:18. DB to VB, 8, 15 October 1916, BFP, I:20. On the rigour of the historiography and methods courses, see VB to Stanley Katz, 26 January 1969, Katz personal archives; Comments on Questionnaire, n.d., VBP, III:1; and course notes, 1917, VBP, III:3. Comments on Questionnaire, n.d., VBP, III:1. ‘Why I was Interested in the Dominion Subject’ (autobiographical manuscript), VBP, VII:26; ‘Comments on the Andrews Article,’ [3 January 1969], Katz personal archives. H.W. Caldwell to VB, 25 January 1916 [sic, for 1917], VBP, IV:8. For Barnes’s marks in graduate courses – ten out of the twelve in the ‘A’ range, with comments ranging up to Andrews’s ‘excellent in every way’ in 1919 – see transcripts in Yale MSSA, YRG, 25–F, RU 262, Graduate School Records, box 16, Viola Barnes File.

180

Notes to pages 32–7

13 DB to VB, [18 December 1916], BFP, I:20. 14 On the Yale fellowships, see W.L. Cross to VB, 31 March 1917, 18 April 1918, VBP, III:12. On health and financial matters, DB to VB, [26 January 1917], BFP, I:21; DB to VB, [8 April 1917], BFP, I:22; VB to DB, 10 January 1967, VBP, VIII:13. 15 Barns, Nebraska Pioneer, 79–81; Sheldon, Nebraska: The Land and the People, 2: 130–1; Olson and Naugle, History of Nebraska, 278–85. 16 DB to VB, [8 April 1917], BFP, I:22. 17 Ruby Barns Waugh to VB, [28 June 1917], VBP, I:56; Barnes Family Genealogy, VBP, I.1. 18 VB to Isabella and Cass Barns, 13 October [1917], BFP, I:20. 19 VB to Mrs Edward T. James, 10 February 1968, VBP, VIII:14; Yale Daily News, 8 October 1917, 17 November 1919. 20 Yale Daily News, 9 December 1916; emphasis added. 21 VB to Mrs Edward T. James, 10 February 1968, VBP, VIII:14. 22 Ibid.; for the related experience of a slightly younger contemporary at Yale, notably with faculty members, see Walton, ‘“Scholar,” “Lady,”’ 177. More generally, see Rosenberg, Divided Lives, 26. 23 Comments on Questionnaire, n.d., VBP, III:1; Yale MSSA, YRG 25–A, RU 212, Graduate School Administrative Records, box 1, Executive Board Minute, 29 November 1918; for street addresses of women graduate students, see Yale University Catalogs, 1917–18, 1918–19. 24 Comments on Questionnaire, n.d., VBP, III:1; VB to Mrs Edward T. James, 10 February 1968, VBP, VIII:14. 25 DB to VB, 11 November 1917, BFP, I:23. 26 See Rossiter, ‘Doctorates for American Women,’ 159–83; Graham, ‘Expansion and Exclusion,’ 764; and Hutchinson, Women and the Ph.D., 21–2. 27 Rossiter, Women Scientists in America: Struggles and Strategies to 1940, 161–3. See also Cott, The Grounding of Modern Feminism, 226–8. On Pound’s views, see Pound, ‘The College Woman and Research,’ in Selected Writings, 311; also DB to VB, [6 March 1916], BFP, I:16. 28 Rosenberg, Beyond Separate Spheres, 239. 29 Poetry: A Magazine of Verse to VB, [5 March 1918], VBP, VII:18, enclosing poems; Note, July 1952, VBP, VII:19; VB to Mary O. Barns Pittenger, 24 May 1972, VBP, VIII:17. See also Ellen Williams, Harriet Monroe and the Poetry Renaissance: The First Ten Years of Poetry, 1912–22 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1977); West, ‘Children on the Plains Frontier,’ in West and Petrik, eds, Small Worlds, 33–40. For a contemporary of Barnes who published in Poetry and wrote in a variety of genres ranging from history to fiction, see Barman, Constance Lindsay Skinner, 68, 112–14, and passim. It

Notes to pages 39–40

30 31 32

33

34

35 36

37

181

is possible that Barnes and Skinner may have met during Skinner’s period of association with Yale University Press in the early 1920s. Other contemporaries of Barnes whose lives paralleled hers in some respects were the sisters and prominent social scientists Edith and Grace Abbott, who shared with Barnes an upbringing in small-town Nebraska and a powerful lifelong sense of the landscape of the plains. See Fitzpatrick, Endless Crusade, 20–5. See MHCA, Interview of VB, 9; ‘Professional Career’ (autobiographical manuscript), VBP, VII:32; VB to [Blanche], 20 December 1958, VBP, VIII:9. MHCA, Interview of VB, 8–9; Nellie Neilson to VB, 4, 10 April 1919, VBP, V:21. Horowitz, Alma Mater, 232–6; Edmonds, A Memory Book, 93–6; Shmurak and Handler, ‘“Castle of Science,”’ esp. 335–6. For recent debates as to the extent to which research was actively encouraged at women’s colleges, see also Frankfort, Collegiate Women, esp. 83; Rossiter, Women Scientists in America: Struggles and Strategies to 1940, esp. 1–28; Dzuback, ‘Women and Social Research at Bryn Mawr College,’ 579–608; Dzuback, ‘Gender and the Politics of Knowledge,’ 180–95. While Frankfort and Rossiter portray women’s colleges as presenting no essential challenge to the prevailing marginalization of women researchers, Dzuback challenges this view and emphasizes the resourcefulness of female researchers in overcoming obstacles. See also Horowitz, The Power and Passion of M. Carey Thomas, xiii. Palmieri, ‘Here Was Fellowship,’ 210. See also Adele Simmons, ‘Education and Ideology in Nineteenth-Century America: The Response of Educational Institutions to the Changing Role of Women,’ in Carroll, ed., Liberating Women’s History, 119–22; Gordon, Gender and Higher Education in the Progressive Era, 26–30, 191–2. VB to [Ruth], 18 June 1946, VBP, VIII:7; Goggin, ‘Challenging Sexual Discrimination,’ 775–8. For contemporary and near-contemporary perspectives on the difficult choices facing academic women during the interwar years, see also Ella Lonn, ‘Academic Status of Women on University Faculties,’ Journal of the American Association of University Women 17 (January 1924), 5–11; and William B. Hesseltine and Louis Kaplan, ‘Women Doctors of Philosophy in History: A Series of Comparisons,’ Journal of Higher Education 14 (1943), 254–9. See Hilda L. Smith, Review of Peter Novick, That Noble Dream, in Journal of Women’s History 4 (1992), 136–7. Palmieri, In Adamless Eden, 77–100, 133–42; Muncy, Creating a Female Dominion, 3–6. On separatism at Mount Holyoke and other women’s colleges, see also Glazier and Slater, Unequal Colleagues, 219–22. Hesseltine and Kaplan, ‘Women Doctors of Philosophy in History,’ 256.

182

Notes to pages 40–6

38 MHCA, Interview of VB, 9. 39 Ibid., 38–9; History Department Recommendation, 4 June 1919, Yale MSSA, YRG, 25–F, RU 262, Graduate School Records, box 16, Viola Barnes File. 40 ‘Professional Career’ (autobiographical manuscript), VBP, VII:32; telephone interview with Stanley N. Katz, 30 September 1998. 41 MHCA, Interview of VB, 4–5. See also Edmonds, A Memory Book, 107–8; Glazier and Slater, Unequal Colleagues, 27–34; and Cole, A Hundred Years of Mount Holyoke College, 253–4. 42 Horowitz, Alma Mater, 232; Cole, A Hundred Years of Mount Holyoke College, 253; Des Jardins, Women and the Historical Enterprise in America, 30–1. 43 Palmieri, In Adamless Eden, 246 and passim. 44 Des Jardins, Women and the Historical Enterprise in America, 32–3; Glazier and Slater, Unequal Colleagues, 45–9; Goggin, ‘Challenging Sexual Discrimination,’ 796; Hastings and Kimball, ‘Two Distinguished Medievalists,’ 144– 9; Sklar, ‘American Female Historians in Context,’ 179–80; Stuard, ‘A New Dimension?’ in Stuard, ed., Women in Medieval History and Historiography, 87. 45 Glazier and Slater, Unequal Colleagues, 45–9; Hastings and Kimball, ‘Two Distinguished Medievalists,’ 144–6, 152–8. 46 See Nellie Neilson, ‘The Department of History and Political Science: History and Aims of the Department,’ Mount Holyoke Alumnae Quarterly 4:1 (April 1920), 1. On the relationship, and increasing separation, between history and political science in this era, see Ross, Origins of American Social Science, 282–8. 47 Hastings and Kimball, ‘Two Distinguished Medievalists,’ 144; on Hastings and Kimball themselves, see Glazier and Slater, Unequal Colleagues, 257 n. 41. 48 Interview with Wilma Pugh, 15 July 1998. 49 Eisenstadt, Charles McLean Andrews, 49–50; Neilson to Andrews, 6 September 1927, Yale MSSA, Andrews Papers, I:307. See also Horowitz, The Power and Passion of M. Carey Thomas, 344. 50 See Palmieri, ‘Here Was Fellowship,’ 197–8. See also Weneck, ‘Social and Cultural Stratification in Women’s Higher Education,’ 1–25 passim. 51 Quoted in Brown, Apostle of Democracy, 102–3. 52 MHCA, Interview of VB, 10, 34. 53 Ibid., 10; Neilson, ‘The Department of History and Political Science,’ 1; Jessie M. Tatlock and Alice C. Cramer, ‘The Teaching of History at Mount Holyoke, 1837–1937,’ [1937], MHCA, History Department Records, series A, folder 1 (form of citation hereafter A:1); Examinations, June 1893,

Notes to pages 46–50

54 55 56 57 58 59

60

61 62

63 64

65 66

183

21 October 1899, 28 May 1918, MHCA, History Department Records, D:4; Communication from Anne Carey Edmonds, 22 July 1998. MHCA, Interview of VB, 9. Ibid., 43–7, 63. Ibid., 39–40. Ibid., 46. Ibid., 14–16; Kendall, ‘Peculiar Institutions’, 167–79; Rosenberg, Divided Lives, 92–3. MHCA, Interview of VB, 41; VB to Helen [Carter], 3 March 1974, VBP, VIII:19; VB to Merle Curti, 23 March 1962, State Historical Society of Wisconsin, Merle Curti Papers. MHCA, Interview of VB, 47; VB to DB, 10 January 1967, VBP, VIII:13; Cass Barns to VB, 5 December 1920, BFP, I:28. On early-twentieth-century developments in breast-cancer treatment, on the longer-term price exacted by the disease, and on recovery of health, see Barron H. Lerner, The Breast Cancer Wars: Hope, Fear, and the Pursuit of a Cure in Twentieth-Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 15–40; Laura K. Potts, ‘Publishing the Personal: Autobiographical Narratives of Breast Cancer and Self,’ in Potts, ed., Ideologies of Breast Cancer: Feminist Perspectives (London: Macmillan, 2000), 98–127; Christopher C. Gates, ‘Psychological Aspects of Breast Cancer,’ in Carl J. D’Orsi and Richard E. Wilson, eds, Carcinoma of the Breast: Diagnosis and Treatment (Boston: Little, Brown, 1983), 255–75; and Win Ann Winkler, Post-Mastectomy: A Personal Guide to Physical and Emotional Recovery (New York: Hawthorn Books, 1976). MHCA, Interview of VB, 41–2, 48; VB to Helen [Carter], 3 March 1974, VBP, VIII:19; VB to DB, 10 January 1967, VBP, VIII:13. MHCA, Interview of VB, 47–8; VB to DB, 10 January 1967, VBP, VIII:13; Cass Barns to VB, 27 October 1920, BFP, I:27; Cass Barns to VB, 5 December 1920, BFP, I:28 DB to VB, 27 January 1919, BFP, I:25. VB to Howard [Beale], 19 November 1952, VBP, VIII:8. In this letter, Barnes tentatively (‘I think’) attributed the episode to her second year rather than her third, but that it occurred in fact in early 1919 is suggested by her linkage of Andrews’s excitement to the writing of his foreword for Beverley Waugh Bond, The Quit-Rent System in the American Colonies (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1919). Charles M. Andrews, ‘Introduction,’ in Bond, Quit-Rent System, 11–23. James Truslow Adams, The Founding of New England (Boston: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1921); Adams, Revolutionary New England, 1691–1776 (Boston: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1923).

184

Notes to pages 51–5

67 VB, fragment of letter, n.d., VBP, VIII:2; VB, fragment of letter, n.d., VBP, VIII:8; S.E. Morison, Review of The Founding of New England, in American Historical Review 27 (1921–2), 129–31. On Adams’s university background and later interest in history, see James Truslow Adams to Charles McLean Andrews, 2 December 1924, Yale MSSA, Andrews Papers, I:264; Adams to Andrews, 21 January 1925, ibid., I:278. 68 James Truslow Adams, Review of The Dominion of New England, in American Historical Review 30 (1924–5), 373–5. 69 Adams to Andrews, 22 January 1921, Yale MSSA, Andrews Papers, I:249. See also the other letters, ibid., I:250, 252–4, 257, 260, 264, 278, 280; and Eisenstadt, Charles McLean Andrews, 127. 70 VB to Howard [Beale], 19 November 1952, VBP, VIII:8; VB to Norma [Adams], 24 February 1952, VBP, VII:35. 71 Howard K. Beale to VB, 29 October 1952, VBP, IV:7. 72 Leonard Labaree to VB, 27 July 1962, MHCA, Viola Barnes Collection, MS 0704 (hereafter VBC), series 1, box 1, folder 7 (form of citation hereafter 1:1:7). 73 Evarts B. Greene, Review of Revolutionary New England, 1691–1776, in American Historical Review 29 (1923–4), 343–4. 74 James Truslow Adams, Review of The Dominion of New England, in The New Republic, 13 May 1925. 75 James Truslow Adams to VB, 23 May 1926, VBP, IV:6; VB to Norma [Adams], 24 February 1952, VBP, VII:35. 76 VB to Norma [Adams], 24 February 1952, VBP, VII:35. 77 Viola Florence Barnes, The Dominion of New England: A Study in British Colonial Policy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1923), viii. 78 Neilson to VB, 12 September 1921, VBP, V:21. 79 MHCA, Interview of VB, 71–8. 80 Ibid., 78–9. 81 VB to Roswell G. Ham, 11 January 1951, VBP, VIII:8. 82 Neilson to VB, 25 August 1924, VBP, V:21. 83 Eloise Ellery to VB, 1 November 1924, 19 and 29 January 1925, VBP, IV:2; VB to Ellery, 4 November 1924, 21 January 1925, ibid.; Charles McLean Andrews to VB, 26 January 1925, ibid. 84 VB, ‘Research Grants I Have Had,’ n.d., VBP, IV:1; Agnes L. Rogers to VB, 3 February 1926, ibid. 85 Nellie Neilson to VB, 17 May 1927, VBP, V:21. 86 Wallace Notestein to VB, 29 June 1927, VBP, IV:2. 87 VB to Mary Woolley, 8 July 1926 [sic, for 1927], VBP, VIII:3. The salary offered was $2800, as opposed to Barnes’s existing salary of $2300. When

Notes to pages 55–9

88 89

90 91 92 93

94 95 96

97 98 99 100 101 102 103

185

she returned to Mount Holyoke, she received an increase to $2600. See Application for Guggenheim Fellowship, [1929], VBP, IV:1. VB to Mary Woolley, 8 July 1926 [sic, for 1927], VBP, VIII:3; Harriet [Newhall] to VB, 18 July 1927, VBP, IV:2. Nellie Neilson to VB, 24 July 1927, VBP, V:21; VB to Neilson, 29 July 1927, ibid.; Neilson to VB, 4 August 1927, ibid.; MHCA, Interview of VB, 11–12. Nellie Neilson to Charles McLean Andrews, 6 September 1927, Yale MSSA, Andrews Papers, I:307; emphasis in original. VB, ‘The Academic Courtesan,’ [1928], VBP, VII:20. MHCA, Interview of VB, 58–9; Margaret Norris to VB, 4 May 1952, VBP, V:7. On the riding school, see ‘Establishment of the Riding School at College’ (autobiographical fragment), VBP, VII:34; VB to Richard Gettell, 13 September 1968, VIII:14; MHCA, Interview of VB, 47–51. Cass Barns to VB, 1 February 1920, VBP, I:8. VB to Charles McLean Andrews, 15 April 1923, Yale MSSA, Andrews Papers, I:267; Eisenstadt, Charles McLean Andrews, 152–3. Barnes, Dominion of New England, 275–7 and passim; Viola Florence Barnes, ‘The Andros Administration in New England,’ PhD diss., Yale University, 1919). On the Durham Report, see G.M. Craig, ed., Lord Durham’s Report (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1963); Ged Martin, The Durham Report and British Policy: A Critical Essay (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972); and Phillip A. Buckner, The Transition to Responsible Government: British Policy in British North America, 1815–1850 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1985). [H.E.E.], Review of The Dominion of New England, in English Historical Review 39 (1924), 466–7. Winfred Trexler Root to VB, 2 November 1924, VBP, IV:14; Charles McLean Andrews to VB, VBP, IV:18. VB, Dominion of New England, vii–viii, 1–3, 273–7, and passim. Travel diary, 25 August–8 September 1925, VBP, VII:25. VB, Richard Wharton: A Seventeenth Century New England Colonial (Cambridge: John Wilson and Son, The University Press, 1926). Ibid., 270. VB to Claude Van Tyne, 21 January 1925, University of Michigan, Bentley Historical Library, Claude Van Tyne Papers, box 2, Correspondence, 1925; Van Tyne to VB, 27 January [1925], VBP, IV:2; VB to Mrs Edward T. James, 10 February 1968, VIII:14; Margaret A. Judson, Breaking the Barrier: A Professional Autobiography by a Woman Educator and Historian before

186

104

105 106

107 108

109

110 111 112 113 114

115 116 117 118

Notes to pages 59–64 the Women’s Movement (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers, 1984), 120. On Alice Freeman Palmer, see Bordin, Alice Freeman Palmer. VB to Elizabeth Thayer, 11 May 1974, VIII:19; VB to A.T. Milne, 23 January 1972, VBP, VIII:17; VB to Roswell G. Ham, 4 February 1937, VBP, VIII:3. On Nicolson, see Walton, ‘“Scholar,” “Lady,”’ 179–80; Nicolson joined the faculty at Smith immediately after her year in London as a Guggenheim fellow, in 1927. See Barns, Nebraska Pioneer, 106; see also clippings, July–September 1927, VBP, VII:29. VB to DB, 14 January 1968, VBP, VIII:14. In the letter, Barnes described this meeting as occurring during one of her first trips ‘in the 1920s,’ from which its date can be inferred. Comments on Questionnaire, n.d., VBP, III:1. MHCA, Interview of VB, 90; Sidney B. Fay to VB, 13 February, 28 May 1929, VBP, IV:2. On Barnes’s use of films (the ‘Chronicles of America Photoplays’), see the correspondence in VBP, IV:55. VB, ‘The Revolution of 1689 (1686–1689),’ in Albert Bushnell Hart, ed., Commonwealth History of Massachusetts: Colony, Province, and State (1606–1926), 5 vols. (New York: States History Company, 1927–30), 1: 582–606; ‘Massachusetts in Ferment (1766–1773),’ ibid., 2: 488–513. VB, ‘The Rise of William Phips,’ New England Quarterly 1 (1928), 271–94; ‘Phippius Maximus,’ ibid., 532–53. Charles McLean Andrews to VB, 26 September 1928, VBP, IV:18. VB, ‘Phippius Maximus,’ 553; see also Baker and Reid, The New England Knight, xiv. VB to Edmund S. Morgan, 4 April 1960, VBP, VIII:11. VB to Charles McLean Andrews, 28 October 1928, Yale MSSA, Andrews Papers, I:317; VB to Andrews, 12 October 1929, ibid., I:329. See also VB, Report to Council of Learned Societies, 16 October 1929, VBP, VIII:3. Donald Grove Barnes, A History of the English Corn Laws from 1660– 1846 (London: Routledge, 1930). See Goggin, ‘Challenging Sexual Discrimination,’ 779–80. VB, Application to Guggenheim Foundation, [15 November 1929], VBP, IV:1. VB, Report to Council of Learned Societies, 16 October 1929, VBP, VIII:3.

Chapter 3

‘A very busy professional woman’

1 VB to Elizabeth [Waugh], 15 October 1938, VBP, VIII:4. 2 VB to Van Tyne, 2 November 1929, University of Michigan, Bentley Histori-

Notes to pages 64–8

3 4 5

6 7 8 9 10 11

12 13

14

15 16 17 18

19

187

cal Library, Claude Van Tyne Papers, box 2, Correspondence, 1929; VB to Andrews, 13 February 1930, Yale MSSA, Andrews Papers, I:334. VB to Woolley, 10 February 1931, VBP, VIII:3. Notification of Trustees of Guggenheim Foundation, 7 March 1930, VBP, IV:51; Henry A. Moe to VB, ibid. Pound to VB, 23 March 1930, VBP, IV:32; for Pound’s membership of the Guggenheim advisory council, 1928–32, see Louise Pound, Selected Writings of Louise Pound, 363. Notification of the Trustees of the Guggenheim Foundation, 7 March 1930, VBP, IV:51; Mary Woolley to VB, 14 March 1930, VBP, IV:2. VB to Virginia Thayer, 11 May 1974, VBP, VIII:19; VB to A.T. Milne, 23 January 1972, VBP, VIII:17. Report, 16 October 1929, VBP, VIII:3. VB to Henry Allen Moe, 28 December 1932, VBP, VIII:3. Claude Halstead Van Tyne, The Loyalists in the American Revolution (New York: Macmillan, 1902), vii. John Bartlet Brebner, New England’s Outpost: Acadia before the Conquest of Canada (New York: Columbia University Press, 1927); Brebner, The Neutral Yankees of Nova Scotia: A Marginal Colony during the Revolutionary Years (New York: Columbia University Press, 1937). Van Tyne, The Loyalists in the American Revolution, 26; Brebner, The Neutral Yankees of Nova Scotia, 309–10. Lawrence Henry Gipson, The British Empire before the American Revolution, 15 vols. (Caldwell, ID: Caxton Printers, 1936–70); VB to Bernard Bailyn, 28 July 1966, VBP, VIII:12. VB to Bailyn, 28 July 1966, VBP, VIII:12. In a posthumous article, Andrews mapped out his plans for three further volumes to be added to his 4-volume history of The Colonial Period of American History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1934–8): Andrews, ‘On the Writing of Colonial History,’ William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 1 (1944), 27–48. Eisenstadt, Charles McLean Andrews, 217. See ‘Report on Grant-in-Aid Project: The Disaster of British Expansionism, 1760–1778,’ [1933], VBP, VI:27. Viola F. Barnes, ‘College Girl and School Ma’am in the Eighteen-Fifties,’ New England Quarterly 3 (1930), 538–62. Times Literary Supplement, 11 February 1932; Viola F. Barnes, ‘Land Tenure in English Colonial Charters of the Seventeenth Century,’ in Essays in Colonial History Presented to Charles McLean Andrews by His Students (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1931), 4–40. VB to Howard [Beale], 19 November 1952, VBP, VIII:8.

188

Notes to pages 69–72

20 Viola F. Barnes, ‘Francis Legge, Governor of Loyalist Nova Scotia, 1773– 1776,’ New England Quarterly 4 (1931), 420–47. 21 See Goggin, ‘Challenging Sexual Discrimination,’ 780–1. 22 Royal Historical Society, Application and Recommendations, [11 October 1934]; Report of Nominating Committee of American Historical Association, 15 May 1936, VBP, IV:44. 23 Labaree to VB, 15 February 1932, VBP, IV:28. 24 Curti to VB, 28 May [1936], VBP, IV:22. 25 For reading lists and other course materials, see VBP, V:28–40. On the Americana collections, see Tracy W. McGregor to VB, 16 April 1934, VBP, V:14; Viola F. Barnes, ‘The McGregor Americana Project,’ reprint from Mount Holyoke Quarterly, August 1943, VBP, V:14. 26 Susan Eisenhart Schilling to the author, 18 February 1999. On Barnes’s discussion method, see Comments on Questionnaire, n.d., VBP, III:1. 27 Merle Curti to VB, [16 March 1932], VBP, IV:2; Harriett Allyn to Curti, 18 March 1932, ibid.; Curti to Roswell G. Ham, 6 January 1938, VBP, IV:22; Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Schlesinger Library, Minutes of Lakeville History Group [later renamed the Berkshire Conference], [19–21 May 1933], Papers of Berkshire Conference (hereafter BCP), folder 3. 28 Outline, 4 February 1936, VBP, VI:18; Newspaper clippings, [February 1936], MHCA, Faculty and Staff Papers, Viola F. Barnes, folder 1. 29 The texts of these broadcasts are in VBP, VI:22; see also the newspaper clippings in VBP, IV:4. 30 Text, [1936], VBP, VI:17. 31 See VB to [Barbara], 31 May 1972, VBP, VIII:17. 32 Report of Department of History and Political Science, 14 June 1933, MHCA, History Department Records, B:1. 33 See DB to VB, 25 October 1931, BFP, I:35. 34 Curti to VB, [16 March 1932], IV:2. 35 Louise Pound to VB, 23 March 1930, VBP, IV:32. 36 DB to VB, 25 October 1931, BFP, I:35. 37 Neilson to Andrews, 30 March 1930, Yale MSSA, Andrews Papers, I:335. 38 Jeannette Marks, Life and Letters of Mary Emma Woolley (Washington: Public Affairs Press, 1955), 68. 39 Barnes to Louise Phelps Kellogg, 21 April 1934, State Historical Society of Wisconsin, Louise Phelps Kellogg Papers; for further discussion of this incident and its context, see also Goggin, ‘Challenging Sexual Discrimination,’ 796–800. 40 Donald Grove Barnes, A History of the English Corn Laws from 1660–1846 (London: Routledge, 1930), xv; see also DB to VB, 5 June 1933, VBP, I:28.

Notes to pages 72–7 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54

55 56 57 58 59 60 61

62 63 64 65 66 67

189

Cass Barns to VB, 18 October 1931, BFP, I:35. Cass Barns to VB, 11 and 27 September, 18 October 1931, BFP, I:34–5. VB to DB, 10 January 1967, VBP, VIII:13. DB to VB, 14 February 1932, BFP, I:38; Cass Barns to VB, 19 February 1932, ibid. DB to VB, 22 December 1931, BFP, I:36; Ruby Barns Waugh to VB, 20 November 1931, BFP, I:35. Cass and Isabella Barns to VB, 28 August 1932, BFP, I:40; for Cass’s campaign platform, see reprint from Madison Star-Mail, [1932], BFP, IV:2. Albion Argus, 15 September 1932; Barns, Nebraska Pioneer, editorial note, 112. Notebook entry, [1934], VBP, VII:16. Notebook entry, October 1934, VBP, VII:16. Ruth Barns to VB, 12 November [1932], BFP, I:42; Sam Waugh to VB, 10 and 28 October 1932, BFP, I:41. Ruby Barns Waugh to VB, 5 November [1932], BFP, I:42. DB to VB, 27 March, 24 April 1933, VBP, I:28. VB to Elizabeth Waugh Brownlee, 12 February 1957, VBP, VIII:9; VB to Mary O. Barns Pittenger, 3 April 1960, VBP, VIII:11. Isabella Barns to VB, 23 August 1934, BFP, I:48; Isabella Barns to VB, 3 February, 19 June 1935, VBP, I:13; VB to Frank Barns, 3 February 1936, VIII:3; VB to DB, 10 January 1967, VBP, VIII:13. Albion Argus, 6 February 1936. VB to Frank Barns, 3 February 1936, VIII:3. VB to Frank Barns, 20 July 1936, 4 January 1937, VBP, VIII:3; VB to Ruth Barns, 17 August 1938, ibid. VB to DB, 19 July 1939, VBP, VIII:4; DB to VB, 11 April 1973, VBP, I:48. VB to Elizabeth Waugh, 15 October 1938, VBP, VIII:4. On the automobile accident, see VBP, VII:5. VB to Charles McLean Andrews, 3 September 1935, Yale MSSA, Andrews Papers, I:398; VB to Ruth Barns, 17 August 1938, VBP, VIII:3; VB to Mary O. Barns Pittenger, 3 April 1960, VBP, VIII:11. DB to VB, 26 December 1935, VBP, I:30. Hesseltine and Kaplan, ‘Women Doctors of Philosophy in History,’ 256. See Goggin, ‘Challenging Sexual Discrimination,’ 776–8; Smith, The Gender of History, 193–4; and Ware, Holding Their Own, 80–1. MHCA, Interview of VB, 26–7; VB to Frank Barns, 3 February 1936, VBP, VIII:3. MHCA, Interview of VB, 26. Curriculum Vitae, [c. 1952], MHCA, Faculty and Staff Papers, Mildred S. Howard.

190

Notes to pages 77–83

68 VB to Mildred Howard, n.d. [1935], VBP, VIII:2. The approximate date of the letter is established by the content, regarding the decorating and contents of the house on Silver Street. 69 VB to Frank Barns, 3 February 1936, VBP, VIII:3. 70 Mildred Howard to VB, 9 July 1936, VBP, V:5. 71 See Des Jardins, Women and the Historical Enterprise in America, 42–3; Rosenberg, Divided Lives, 92–3; and Smith, The Gender of History, 193–7. 72 MHCA, Interview of VB, 1–2. 73 VB to Mildred [Campbell], 11 March 1939, VBP, VIII:4. 74 See Cole, A Hundred Years of Mount Holyoke College, 342–3. 75 MHCA, Interview of VB, 22. For more general accounts of the controversy, see Horowitz, Alma Mater, 303–4; George Martin, Madam Secretary: Frances Perkins (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1976), 369–77; Ware, Holding Their Own, 81; and Wells, Miss Marks and Miss Woolley, 223–39. 76 Wells, Miss Marks and Miss Woolley, 232–9. 77 Martin, Madam Secretary, 373–4. 78 MHCA, Interview of VB, 21–6. 79 VB to Alva Morrison, 19 August 1936, VBP, VIII:3; VB to Roswell G. Ham, 4 February 1937, ibid.; VB to Louise Phelps Kellogg, 5 February 1937, Wisconsin State Historical Society, Kellogg Papers. 80 VB to Louise Phelps Kellogg, 5 February 1937, Wisconsin State Historical Society, Kellogg Papers. 81 MHCA, Interview of VB, 26. 82 VB to Mrs Whitman, 3 November 1938, VBP, VIII:3. 83 VB to Edgar S. Furniss, 13 September 1936, VBP, VIII:3. 84 Minutes, 25 November 1936, MHCA, History Department Records, series C, subseries 1, folder 1; cited hereafter C (1):1. 85 VB to Neilson, 19 March 1937, VBP, VIII:3. 86 [VB], ‘Field Majors in Other Colleges,’ MHCA, History Department Records, A:1; Minutes, 29 September, 8 December 1937, ibid., C (1):1. 87 VB to Bertha [Putnam], 12 January 1939, VBP, VIII:4; MHCA, Interview of VB, 29. 88 VB, ‘Establishing the American Culture Major’ (autobiographical fragment), VBP, VII:33. 89 Ibid.; VB to Harriet [Allyn], 16 September 1946, VBP, VIII:7. For further discussion of Barnes’s role in promoting interdisciplinary study, see Des Jardins, Women and the Historical Enterprise in America, 77–8. 90 MHCA, Interview of VB, 82. 91 Cole, A Hundred Years of Mount Holyoke College; VB to Alva Morrison, 6 February 1935, VBP, VIII:3; VB to Morrison, 7 July 1940, VBP, VIII:5; Morrison to VB, 16 July 1940, VBP, V:1; MHCA, Interview of VB, 82–5.

Notes to pages 83–7

191

92 See Goggin, ‘Challenging Sexual Discrimination,’ 794; Scott, Gender and the Politics of History, 190–1; and Zinsser, History and Feminism, 98–9. 93 VB to Mrs Edward W. James, 17 February 1967, VBP, VIII:13. 94 VB, ‘Early History of the Berkshire History Group, Written in Fall of 1976,’ VBP, IV:9; Louise Fargo Brown, ‘History,’ 1951, BCP, folder 1; Panel discussion, Red Lion Inn, 12 May 1973, ibid. See also Des Jardins, Women and the Historical Enterprise in America, 38–41. 95 VB to Mrs Edward W. James, 26 May 1967, VBP, VIII:13. 96 Ibid.; Report of the Secretary, Special Business Meeting, 19 May 1935, BCP, folder 3. 97 Judson, Breaking the Barrier, 78. 98 Minutes, Lakeville History Group, 19–21 May 1933, BCP, folder 3; Survey on Exchange Professorships, 1931, BCP, folder 2. See also the valuable discussion of the Berkshire Conference, and Barnes’s leadership, in Des Jardins, Women and the Historical Enterprise in America, 219–25. 99 VB to Mrs Aurelia Henry Reinhardt, 25 April 1936, VBP, VIII:1. 100 Minutes, Lakeville History Group, 11–13 May 1934, BCP, folder 3; Minutes, 17–19 May 1935, ibid.; Minutes, 15–17 May 1936, ibid. 101 Minutes, Lakeville History Group, 17–19 May 1935, ibid. 102 VB to [Beatrice] Reynolds, 4 May 1937, VBP, IV:47; VB and Beatrice Reynolds to Members, May 1938, BCP, folder 3; Suggested Topics for Discussion, [May 1938], ibid. 103 See also Goggin, ‘Challenging Sexual Discrimination,’ 794–6; Scott, Gender and the Politics of History, 190–1. 104 VB to Charles McLean Andrews, 3 September 1935, Yale MSSA, Andrews Papers, I:398; Andrews to VB, 20 October 1935, VBP, IV:18. 105 J.B. Brebner to VB, 14 January 1938, VBP, IV:7; VB, Review of Brebner, The Neutral Yankees of Nova Scotia, in American Historical Review 43 (1937– 8), 411–12. For further discussion of the review and its significance, see John G. Reid, ‘Viola Barnes, the Gender of History and the North Atlantic Mind,’ Acadiensis 33:1 (Fall 2003), 3–20. 106 Dictionary of American History, ed. J.T. Adams, 5 vols. (New York: C. Scribner’s Sons, 1940); see also VBP, VI:14. 107 W.T. Couch to VB, 23 January 1935, VBP, VI:5; Memorandum of Agreement, n.d., is enclosed. 108 W.W. Norton to VB, 13 October, 8 November 1937, 22 January 1938, VBP, VI:6. 109 Andrews to VB, 16 February 1937, VBP, IV:18; see also VB to Nellie Neilson, 9 July 1937, VBP, VIII:3. In 1936, Oxford University Press had made Barnes an apparently unsolicited approach for a manuscript on eighteenth-

192

Notes to pages 87–94

century British expansion. Nothing seems to have come of this initiative. Howard F. Lowry to VB, 22 December 1936, VBP, VI:4. 110 Louise Fargo Brown to VB, 10 February 1938, VBP, IV:7. 111 Merle Curti to Roswell G. Ham, 6 January 1938, VBP, IV:22. Chapter 4

‘I want to build a good strong department’

1 VB to Mildred Campbell, 1 March 1939, VBP, VIII:4. 2 VB to ‘Mr. Anderson,’ 30 January 1939, VBP, VIII:4. 3 VB to Bertha Putnam, 12 January 1939, VBP, VIII:4; MHCA, Interview of VB, 29. 4 See, e.g., VB to [Emily] Hickman, 7 April 1939, VBP, VIII:4; see also VB to Violet [Barbour], 9 February 1939, Ibid. 5 See Cass Barns to VB, 14 April 1916, VBP, I:8; DB to VB, 6 and 27 May 1935, VBP, I:30; and Frank Barns to Sam Waugh, 19 March 1936, VBP, I:51. 6 Gordon, Gender and Higher Education in the Progressive Era, 47–8; Horowitz, The Power and Passion of M. Carey Thomas, 230–2, 381; Solomon, In the Company of Educated Women, 143; Weneck, ‘Social and Cultural Stratification in Women’s Higher Education,’ 18. On refugee scholars at women’s colleges, see Kendall, ‘Peculiar Institutions,’ 200–2. 7 Cott, The Grounding of Modern Feminism, 4, 238–9; Rosenberg, Beyond Separate Spheres, 110–13. 8 VB to William E. Weld, 18 March 1939, VBP, VIII:4; see also Goggin, ‘Challenging Sexual Discrimination,’ 772–5. 9 VB to [Mary], 21 January 1940, VBP, VIII:5. 10 VB to Wallace Notestein, 23 March 1939, VBP, VIII:4. 11 On the varieties of inter-war feminism, see Rupp, Worlds of Women, 130–9. 12 VB to Violet [Barbour], 9 February 1939, VBP, VIII:4. 13 VB to Mildred [Campbell], 26 February, 1 and 11 March, 5 April, 6 May 1939, ibid.; VB to Mr and Mrs [Robert G.] Albion, 9 September 1951, VBP, VIII:8. 14 VB to ‘Mr. Anderson,’ 30 January 1939, VBP, VIII:4; see also VB to Jessie [Tatlock], 24 January 1940, VBP, VIII:5. 15 VB to [Beatrice], 11 October 1940, VBP, VIII:5; VB to [Elizabeth], 29 October 1940, ibid.; VB to ‘Miss Hanson,’ 16 December 1940, ibid. 16 See VB to Roswell G. Ham, 17 February 1944, VBP, VIII:7. 17 VB to [Elizabeth], 15 February 1941, VBP, VIII:6. 18 Report of the Department of History for the Year 1941–1942, MHCA, History Department Records, B:2, 2. 19 Ham to VB, 20 March 1940, VBP, IV:2.

Notes to pages 94–9

193

20 Report of Dept. of History, 1941–2, MHCA, History Dept. Records, B:2, 4. 21 Ibid., 4–6. 22 VB to Ham, 3 February 1940, VBP, VIII:5; Report of Dept. of History, 1941– 2, MHCA, History Dept. Records, B:2, 6. 23 VB to [Frederick] Eliot, 3 July 1942 VBP, VIII:6. 24 VB to Cramer, 1 November [1948], VBC, 3:7:1; VB to Ham, 4 February 1949, ibid.; Interview with Wilma Pugh, 15 July 1998; Minutes of Berkshire Conference, 27 May 1944, BCP, folder 4. 25 VB to Bertha Putnam, 12 January 1939, VBP, VIII:4; VB to [Helen], 14 January 1939, ibid.; Des Jardins, Women and the Historical Enterprise in America, 222–5; Goggin, ‘Challenging Sexual Discrimination,’ 800–2. 26 VB to Ham, 26 February 1946, VBP, VIII:7. 27 VB to Frederick Eliot, 8 March 1943, VBP, VIII:6. 28 VB to Norma Adams, 25 July, 9 and 16 August 1943, VBP, VIII:6; VB to Ham, 17 February 1944, VBP, VIII:7. 29 VB to Ruth [McIntyre], 18 June 1946, VBP, VIII:7. 30 Ibid. 31 VB to Carrie Chapman Catt, 9 December 1940, VBP, VIII:5. 32 Mary Gray Peck, Carrie Chapman Catt: A Biography (New York: H.W. Wilson, 1944), 464–6; Goggin, ‘Challenging Sexual Discrimination,’ 783–4. On the career of Carrie Chapman Catt, see Cott, The Grounding of Modern Feminism, 275–6; Des Jardins, Women and the Historical Enterprise in America, 185–8, 203–10; Peck, Carrie Chapman Catt, passim; and Rosenberg, Divided Lives, 70–3. 33 Minutes of Berkshire Conference, 12–14 May 1939, BCP, folder 3; ibid., 17–19 May 1940, 16–18 May 1941, BCP, folder 4. 34 Conyers Read to VB, 25 January 1939, VBP, IV:44; VB to Conyers Read, 17 January 1940, VBP, VIII:5. 35 Pound to VB, 4 December 1940, VBP, IV:32. 36 VB to Carrie Chapman Catt, 23 December 1940, VBP, VIII:5. 37 Pound to VB, 28 April [1941], VBP, IV:32. 38 C.S. Boucher to VB, 12 May 1941, VBP, II:23. 39 VB to C.S. Boucher, 16 May 1941, VBP, VIII:6; VB to Louise Pound, 24 May 1941, ibid. 40 Evening State Journal (Lincoln, NE), 9 June 1941; Nebraska Alumnus, June 1941; VB to Elizabeth Waugh Brownlee, 7 May 1968, VBP, VIII:14. 41 VB to Mary O. Barns, n.d., VBP, VIII:2. 42 VB to Frank Barns, Jr, 1 June 1940, VBP, VIII:5. 43 VB to DB, 9 July 1940, VBP, VIII:5. 44 VB to Mildred Howard, 23 July 1940, VBP, VIII:5.

194

Notes to pages 99–104

45 VB to Merle Curti, 30 December 1944, State Historical Society of Wisconsin, Curti Papers; VB to Frank Barns, Jr, 19 January 1943, VBP, VIII:6; VB to [Blanche], 20 December 1958, VBP, VIII:9. 46 VB to Mary O. Barns, 28 July 1945, VBP, VIII:7. 47 Ibid. 48 Ballard to VB, 14 June 1939, 11 October 1943, 3 June 1953, VBP, II:7. 49 VB to Mary O. Barns Pittenger, 3 April 1960, VBP, VIII:11. 50 MHCA, Interview of VB, 27. 51 VB to ‘Mr. Skinner,’ 22 May 1939, VBP, VIII:4; VB to Curti, 19 August 1950, State Historical Society of Wisconsin, Curti Papers. 52 Tribute to VB, 16 August 1979, MHCA, Faculty and Staff Papers, Viola F. Barnes, folder 1. 53 Garden Book, 1943–9, VBP, VII:11. 54 VB to Mildred Howard, 1 September [1939?], VBP, VIII:4. 55 Ibid. 56 VB to Mildred Howard, 23 July 1940, VBP, VIII:5. 57 Curti to Roswell G. Ham, 6 January 1938, VBP, IV:22. 58 VB, Report on Doris Mintz thesis, 3 April 1940, VBP, VIII:5; VB to ‘Mr. Holmes,’ 19 February 1940, ibid. Although Perry Miller’s appointment at Harvard was in American literature, his work was clearly historical and his appointment later in his career was in history. On the session, see American Historical Review 45 (1939–40), 526–7, and on the wider significance of the cultural orientation of the 1939 AHA meetings as a whole, see Fitzpatrick, History’s Memory, 185–7. 59 Perry Miller, The New England Mind: The Seventeenth Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1939), vii–ix. 60 Charles McLean Andrews, ‘On the Writing of Colonial History,’ William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 1 (1944), 48. 61 ‘Historical News,’ ibid., 91–3. 62 Report of Dept. of History, 1939–40, MHCA, History Dept. Records, B:2. 63 VB to [Addison] Burnham, 29 October 1939, VBP, VIII:4. 64 VB to Addison Burnham, 15 June 1940, VBP, VIII:5. 65 Addison Burnham to VB, 13 January 1942, 26 January, 10 April 1945, VBP, VI:7; VB to W.W. Norton Co., 7 April 1945, VBP, VIII:7. 66 John W. Taylor to VB, 28 May 1947, VBP, VI:4; James Van Toor to VB, ibid.; VB, ‘Research Grants I Have Had for the Three-Volume Study of the Revolution,’ VBP, IV:1; surviving chapters from the textbook manuscript are in VBP, VI:25. 67 VB to Curtis P. Nettels, 11 January 1940, VBP, VIII:5. On the series, see Net-

Notes to pages 104–11

68 69 70

71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79

80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88

89

90

195

tels, The Emergence of a National Economy, 1775–1815 (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1962), v-vi. VB to ‘Mr. Coleman,’ 21 March 1941, VBP, VIII:6. VB to Herbert Keller, 4 July 1940, VBP, VIII:5. VB, Draft Announcement of SSRC Grant, [1949], VBC, 2:3:3; VB, Report on Grant-in-Aid for the Summer of 1949, [1949], VBP, IV:1; VB to Bernard Bailyn, 28 July 1966, VBP, VIII:12. VB, Report on Grant-in-Aid, [1949], VBP, IV:1; VB, ‘Work Diary, No. 1,’ 1949, VBP, VI:29, 26, 121. VB, ‘Work Diary, No. 1,’ 1949, VBP, VI:29, 61. See VB, ‘Britain in the Shadow of World Revolution, 1760–1776’ (3 vols.; unpublished ms), VBC, 2:4:1–17; 2:5:1–17; 2:6:1–19. VB, Report on Grant-in-Aid, [1949], VBP, IV:1. VB to Merle Curti, 11 September 1949, State Historical Society of Wisconsin, Merle Curti Papers. VB to Homer E. Capehart, 16 December 1949, VBC, 3:7:1; New York Times, 16 December 1949. VB, Writings on Travel in England, 1949, VBP, VII:31. VB to Mildred [Campbell], 5 April 1939, VBP, VIII:4. VB to Fulton Lewis, Jr, 22 February 1949, VBC, 3:7:1. The phrase ‘crusade history’ was used in an earlier letter on the same subject: VB to Edgar Robinson, 11 June 1948, ibid. Fulton Lewis, Jr, to VB, 28 February 1949, VBP, IV:11. VB to Fulton Lewis, Jr, 11 July 1951, VBP, VIII:8. VB to ‘Mr. Holmes, 19 February 1940, VBP, VIII:5. VB to Charlotte Haywood, 14 March 1943, VBP, VIII:6; Haywood to VB, 20 March 1943, V:4. Minutes of Faculty Meeting, 7 November, 5 December 1949, MHCA, Records of Faculty Meetings; Interview with Wilma Pugh, 15 July 1998. All of this is extracted from a large volume of material in VBP, V:24–42. VB to Carrie Chapman Catt, 23 December 1940, VBP, VIII:5. VB to ‘Mrs. George Howard,’ 16 April 1950, VBP, VIII:8. Ibid.; Doris P. Mintz, ‘Women Leaders in Early Nineteenth Century America’ (MA thesis, Mount Holyoke College, 1940); VB, Report on thesis of Doris Mintz, 3 April 1940, VBP, VIII:5. Nancy F. Cott, ‘Putting Women on the Record: Mary Ritter Beard’s Accomplishment,’ in Cott, ed., A Woman Making History, 19–48, 62; Des Jardins, Women and the Historical Enterprise in America, 217–27; Smith, The Gender of History, 232. VB, ‘Comments on Questionnaire,’ n.d., VBP, III:1.

196

Notes to pages 112–18

91 VB to Stanley N. Katz, 26 January 1969, Stanley N. Katz, personal archives. 92 Margaret McLean to VB, 20 April 1952, VBP, V:10. 93 Helene Phillips Herzig to VB, 27 April 1952, VBP, V:11. A large number of other letters are in VBP, V:9–12. 94 Vivian Snyder Hunter Nieman to author, 29 November 1998. 95 Dorothy Hafemeyer Johnson to author, 14 December 1998. Chapter 5

‘There is not too much time left’

1 VB to Mary O. Barns Pittenger, 19 December 1958, VBP, VIII:9. 2 Frederick Cramer to VB, 14 June 1950, VBP, V:19. 3 VB to Merle Curti, 21 December 1950, 25 August and 23 October 1951, State Historical Society of Wisconsin, Merle Curti Papers; Meribeth Cameron, Annual Report of Department of History, 1951–2, MHCA, History Department Records, B:3. See also Donald R. McCoy, The Presidency of Harry S. Truman (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1984), 175. 4 Roswell G. Ham to VB, 17 March 1952, VBP, IV:2. Even though ‘Professor Emeritus’ was the masculine form of the title, it was the one specified by Ham and the one Barnes habitually used. 5 Meribeth Cameron, Annual Report of Dept. of History, 1951–2, MHCA, History Dept. Records, B:3. 6 VB to Mr and Mrs [Robert G.] Albion, 9 September 1951, VBP, VIII:8. 7 Mary Sumner Benson, Women in Eighteenth-Century America: A Study of Opinion and Social Usage (New York: Columbia University Press, 1935). For Barnes’s perspectives on the search, see VB to Merle Curti, 25 August 1951, 1 and 26 January 1952, State Historical Society of Wisconsin, Merle Curti Papers. See also Wilma Pugh to [Meribeth] Cameron, 5 June 1951, MHCA, History Dept. Records, C (ii):3. 8 Novick, That Noble Dream, 364–7; Des Jardins, Women and the Historical Enterprise in America, 265–6. 9 Rossiter, Women Scientists in America before Affirmative Action, 30–1. 10 Ibid., 32–6. On the wider societal implications of postwar shifts in women’s roles, see May, Homeward Bound, 75–89 and passim. 11 See Olsen, ‘Remaking the Image,’ 421–3 and passim. 12 VB to ‘Dorothy,’ 28 January 1951, VBP, VIII:8. 13 VB to Curti, 23 October 1951, State Historical Society of Wisconsin, Merle Curti Papers. 14 VB to ‘Dorothy,’ 28 January 1951, VBP, VIII:8; VB to Curti, 26 January 1952, State Historical Society of Wisconsin, Merle Curti Papers.

Notes to pages 118–22

197

15 VB to Curti, 1 January 1952, State Historical Society of Wisconsin, Merle Curti Papers. 16 Ibid. 17 Michael McGiffert, [Introduction], ‘Early American Emeriti III,’ William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 52 (1995), 453. 18 ‘Early American Emeriti: A Symposium of Experience and Evaluation,’ William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 41 (1984), 409–86; ‘Early American Emeriti II,’ ibid., 45 (1988), 517–87; ‘Early American Emeriti III,’ 453–512. 19 ‘Early American Emeriti II,’ 546. 20 ‘Early American Emeriti III,’ 461. 21 ‘Early American Emeriti,’ 445. 22 Ibid., 437. 23 ‘Early American Emeriti II,’ 528. 24 The phrase is, of course, borrowed from Novick, That Noble Dream. 25 Ibid., 366–7. 26 VB to Roswell G. Ham, 8 February 1951, VBP, VIII:8; Novick, That Noble Dream, 368–70. 27 Miller, Review of Richard Hofstadter’s American Political Tradition, quoted in Novick, That Noble Dream, 381. 28 VB to Nancy [Norton], 16 December 1956, VBP, VIII:9; Minutes of Berkshire Conference, 1950–4, BCP, folder 5; VB to Merle Curti, 23 October 1951, State Historical Society of Wisconsin, Merle Curti Papers. 29 Mildred Campbell et al. to VB, 11 November 1956, VBP, IV:47. 30 VB to Dorothy [Fowler], 6 January, VBP, VIII:9; VB to Ruth [Emery], 5 May 1958, ibid.; VB to Mildred [Campbell], 30 June 1960, VBP, VIII:11. Other letters in VBP, VIII:9 provide additional details of the events of 1956–7. 31 VB to John Perry Miller, 5 August 1967, VBP, VIII:13; see also VB to Louis B. Wright, 12 February 1971, VBP, VIII:16. 32 VB to John Perry Miller, 5 August 1967, VBP, VIII:13. For further reflections on women’s exclusion, see interview with Wilma Pugh, 15 July 1998, and Gerda Lerner, ‘Women Among the Professors of History: The Story of a Process of Transformation,’ in Eileen Boris and Nupur Chaudhuri, eds, Voices of Women Historians: The Personal, the Political, the Professional (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1999), 1–3; for a more general approach to gender discrimination in the era, see Bernard, Academic Women, esp. 41–53. That the ultimatum to leave the lounge had been delivered by Richard Morris raised other issues. Morris, a Jew, had experienced discrimination at first hand. See the comments of one of his graduate students, Milton M. Klein, in ‘Early American Emeriti III,’ 485. In one sense, it was ironic that he should be insisting on the enforcement of an exclusionist

198

33

34 35 36 37 38

39 40

41 42 43

44 45 46

47 48 49 50 51

Notes to pages 122–6

rule at the expense of female colleagues. But there was equal irony in the righteous indignation expressed by Barnes. While she was fully entitled as a woman to take umbrage, nevertheless as an individual of anti-Semitic tendency she came by it less honestly. Minutes of the Conference on Colonial History, 23 April 1955, VBC, 2:3:2; VB to Louis B. Wright, 12 February 1971, VBP, VIII:16; ‘Historical News,’ American Historical Review 61 (1955–6), 516. See VB to Merle Curti, 19 August 1950, State Historical Society of Wisconsin, Merle Curti Papers. VB to ‘Mr. Hermes,’ 6 and 9 December 1951, VBP, VIII:8; VB to ‘Margaret,’ 20 November 1966, VBP, VIII:12. VB to DB, 14 January 1968, VBP, VIII:14. VB to ‘Louise,’ 6 July 1956, VBP, VIII:9; VB to O.M. Scott & Sons Co., 30 July 1956, ibid.; VB to ‘Margaret,’ 20 November 1966, VBP, VIII:12. VB to Merle Curti, 23 October 1951, State Historical Society of Wisconsin, Merle Curti Papers; VB to [‘Mr. Adams,’ 11 October 1941] [sic], VBP, VIII:6. Filed with the latter document is a page that can be dated, from its contents, to 1952. VB to Frank Barns, 4 July 1960, VBP, VIII:11. VB to DB, 11 October 1960, VBP, VIII:11. See also VB to Merle Curti, 2 August 1960, State Historical Society of Wisconsin, Merle Curti Papers; and VB to DB, 10 November 1971, VBP, VIII:16. VB to Frank M. Barns, 14 December 1958, VBP, VIII:9. Instructions, 31 May 1959, VBP, VIII:10. Donald Grove Barnes, George III and William Pitt, 1783–1806: A New Interpretation Based upon a Study of Their Unpublished Correspondence (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1939). DB to VB, 31 January 1955, VBP, I:42; VB to Merle Curti, 26 September 1950, State Historical Society of Wisconsin, Merle Curti Papers. DB to VB, 31 January 1955, VBP, I:42. DB to VB, 28 February 1941, VBP, I:36; DB to VB, 23 May 1942, ibid.; R.H. Tawney, Religion and the Rise of Capitalism: A Historical Study (London: J. Murray, 1926). DB to VB, 31 January 1955, VBP, I:42. VB to ‘Louise,’ 6 July 1956, VBP, VIII:9. VB to ‘Blanche,’ 20 December 1958, ibid. DB to VB, 16 July 1965, VBP, I:44; VB to Alfred A. Knopf, 24 January 1955, VBP, VIII:8. VB to Elbridge Sibley, 28 March 1956, VBP, IV:1.

Notes to pages 126–31

199

52 VB to Henry A. Moe, 30 April 1959, VBP, VIII:10. 53 VB to David Horne, 26 March 1959, VBP, VIII:10; VB to Edmund S. Morgan, 5 July 1960 (unsent), VBP, VIII:11. 54 Ibid. 55 Viola Florence Barnes, ‘Britain in the Shadow of World Revolution, 1760– 1776,’ VBC, 2:6:1–19. 56 Draft passage on John and Abigail Adams, 18 July 1976, VBC, ‘Folder of Writings: Study of Origins of American Revolution – Drafts.’ 57 This summary is drawn from volume 1, ‘George III and Lord Bute’s System, 1760–1768,’ VBC, 2:4:1–17. 58 Lewis B. Namier, The Structure of Politics at the Accession of George III (London: Macmillan, 1929; 2nd ed., 1957); Namier, England in the Age of the American Revolution (London: Macmillan, 1930; 2nd ed., 1961). 59 Namier, England in the Age of the American Revolution (2nd ed.), 4. 60 See Bernard Bailyn, Education in the Forming of American Society (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1960) and Alfred F. Young, ‘American Historians Confront “The Transforming Hand of Revolution,”’ in Ronald Hoffman and Peter J. Albert, eds, The Transforming Hand of Revolution: Reconsidering the American Revolution as a Social Movement (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1995), 411. 61 This discussion draws from a number of the many syntheses available, including Bernard Bailyn, ‘The Central Themes of the American Revolution: An Interpretation,’ in Stephen G. Kurtz and James H. Hutson, eds, Essays on the American Revolution (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1973), 3–31, and Edmund S. Morgan, ‘Conflict and Consensus in the American Revolution,’ ibid., 289–309. I have relied especially on Young, ‘American Historians Confront “The Transforming Hand of Revolution,”’ ibid., 346– 422. I thank my colleague Richard Twomey for bringing this essay to my attention. 62 See Jack P. Greene, ‘An Uneasy Connection: An Analysis of the Preconditions of the American Revolution,’ in Kurtz and Hutson, eds, Essays on the American Revolution, 34–5. 63 Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707–1837 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), 204–17. On the intellectual origins of Namier’s portrayal of George III, see also Colley, Lewis Namier (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1989), 50–5. Barnes’s interpretive position is further discussed in Reid, ‘Viola Barnes, the Gender of History and the North Atlantic Mind,’ 15–20. 64 Edmund S. Morgan and Helen M. Morgan, The Stamp Act Crisis: Prologue to Revolution (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1953);

200

65 66 67 68 69

70 71 72 73 74 75

76 77 78 79 80 81 82

Notes to pages 131–5

Edmund S. Morgan, The Birth of the Republic, 1763–89 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1956). Edmund S. Morgan, ‘The American Revolution: Revisions in Need of Revising,’ William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 14 (1957), 3–8. Ibid., 7–15. Ibid., 8. Archibald S. Foord, His Majesty’s Opposition, 1714–1830 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1964); Morgan to VB, 20 October 1959, VBC, 1:1:10. Foord to Horne, 4 June 1959, Yale MSSA, YRG 34–C, RU 168, Yale University Press Records, box 75, Viola Barnes file; Report of [Archibald Foord], n.d., ibid. Readers’ Reports, ibid. David Horne to VB, 12 June 1959, VBC, 1:2:10. See VB to Merle Curti, 2 August 1960, State Historical Society of Wisconsin, Merle Curti Papers. VB to David Horne, 15 June 1959, VBP, VIII:10. VB to David Horne, 31 August 1959, VBP, VIII:10. See also VB to Edmund S. Morgan, 22 May 1966, VBP, VIII:12. VB to Wallace Notestein, 15 September 1959, VBP, VIII:10; VB to Carl Bridenbaugh, 18 September 1959, ibid.; VB to Edmund S. Morgan, 15 October 1959, ibid.; Morgan to VB, 20 October 1959, VBC, 1:1:10; Minutes of Publications Committee, 5 October 1959, Yale MSSA, YRG 34-C, RU 168, Yale UP Records, box 75, Barnes file. Although the main thrust of Morgan’s letter to Barnes was to show the integrity of Yale’s process of consideration, he was distressed at the inclusion of his own name among the authors Barnes had been asked to consider in the original Yale letter of 12 June. Edmund S. Morgan to VB, 7 February 1960, VBC, 1:1:10; VB to Morgan, 4 April 1960, VBP, VIII:11; Edmund S. Morgan to author, 13 August 1998. Morgan to VB, 16 May, 5 June 1960, VBC, 1:1:10; Barnes to Morgan, 31 August–6 September 1960, VBP, VIII:11. VB to ‘Mr. Wilson,’ VBP, 11 September 1960, VBP, VIII:11; Mark Carroll to VB, 19 October 1960, VBC, 1:2:2. J. Steven Watson, The Reign of George III, 1760–1815 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1960). VB to Morgan, 11 May 1960, VBP, VIII:11. She mentions the Rouse article in her letter to Morgan cited in the next note. VB to Morgan, 23 December 1960, VBP, VIII:11; VB to Leonard Labaree, 27 April 1966, VBP, VIII:12. VB to Morgan, 23 December 1960, VBP, VIII:11; Reader’s comment, [12 June 1959], VBC, 1:2:10; Watson, George III, 7.

Notes to pages 136–8

201

83 VB to Morgan, 23 December 1960, VBP, VIII:11; Morgan to VB, 16 and 27 December 1960, VBC, 1:1:10. 84 Gail M. Filion (Princeton University Press) to VB, 22 August 1962, VBC, 1:2:7; Ronald Mansbridge (Cambridge UP) to VB, 10 April, 14 and 27 May 1963, VBC, 1:1:21; P.H. Sutcliffe (Oxford UP) to VB, 20 May 1964, VBP, VI:4; Sutcliffe to VB, 5 May 1965, VBP, VI:7. 85 Dora Mae Clark, The Rise of the British Treasury: Colonial Administration in the Eighteenth Century (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1960). 86 DB to VB, 31 January 1955, VBP, I:42; Edmund S. Morgan to author, 13 August 1998. 87 I have chosen not to speculate as to whether Viola Barnes could have been found clinically to suffer from a paranoid personality disorder. On the face of it, she would have fulfilled the specific behavioural criteria. More complex, however, were the questions of whether the disorder had already appeared by early adulthood and whether it presented itself in a variety of contexts – both important considerations in diagnosis. The close connection of her fears with her professional life, in which doubts and apprehensions had been all too frequently and all too well justified, suggests that social and psychological factors were inseparable from one another. For the relevant diagnostic criteria, see David P. Bernstein, David Useda, and Larry J. Siever, ‘Paranoid Personality Disorder,’ in W. John Livesley, ed., The DSM-IV Personality Disorders (New York: Guilford Press, 1995), esp. 48–50. 88 VB to Mildred Campbell, 30 June 1960, VBP, VIII:11. From the Yale perspective, of course, this was not the issue. See Morgan to VB, 16 May, 16 December 1960, VBC, 1:1:10. 89 Caroline Robbins to VB, 25 May 1960, VBP, IV:26. 90 David Horne to Archibald S. Foord, 11 June 1959, Yale MSSA, YRG 34-C, RU 168, Yale UP Records, box 75, Barnes file; David Horne to Edmund S. Morgan, 18 June 1959, ibid.; Minutes of Publications Committee, 13 February 1961, ibid. 91 VB to John Perry Miller, 5 August 1967, VBP, VIII:13. 92 Helen Taft Manning, British Colonial Government after the American Revolution, 1782–1820 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1960). 93 Viola Florence Barnes, The Dominion of New England: A Study in British Colonial Policy (repr. New York: Frederick Ungar Publishing, 1960); VB to Frederick Ungar, 15 October 1960, VBP, VIII:11. 94 Jack P. Greene to VB, 16 March 1962, VBP, VI:5; Helen Taft Manning to VB, 12 January 1964, VBP, IV:29. 95 ‘Historical News,’ American Historical Review 66 (1960–1), 878.

202

Notes to pages 139–44

Chapter 6 1 2 3 4 5 6 7

8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25

‘I have had a very happy old age’

VB to Elizabeth Waugh Brownlee, 12 February 1972, VBP, VIII:17. VB to DB, [23 December 1974], VBP, VIII:19. VB to Mildred Howard, 21 June 1968, VBP, VIII:14. VB to Ruth Roettinger, 7 March 1968, VBP, VIII:14. VB to [Hal], [c. 1966], VBP, VIII:12. Telephone interview with Stanley N. Katz, 30 September 1998. DB to VB, 26 December 1935, VBP, I:30; VB to [?], n.d., VBP, VIII:6. The second of these sources is the second page of a letter that has apparently become separated from the first. Although the page is joined to the first page of a letter of 11 October 1941 to ‘Mr. Adams,’ the context makes it clear that the two are mismatched. The full text of the relevant passage reads: ‘I hear you are a neighbor! I wish you would run around the corner for a highball or tea, and finish seeing my house.’ William S. McFeely, ‘Viola Florence Barnes,’ 24 September 1979, MHCA, Faculty and Staff Papers, Viola F. Barnes, folder 1. Stanley N. Katz to author, 13 August 1998. See also his Foreword, vii–viii above. VB to DB, 25 December 1970, VBP, VIII:15. See VB to DB, 18 June 1971, VBP, VIII:16. On Miff’s retirement dinner on 11 May 1963, see Springfield Union, 13 May 1963. DB to VB, 29 November–5 December 1964, VBP, I:43; VB to [Margaret], 20 November 1966, VBP, VIII:12. VB to DB, 30 September 1967, VBP, VIII:13; VB to [Catherine], 11 April 1972, VBP, VIII:17; VB to [Gladys], 10 August 1972, ibid. VB to DB, 8 October 1968, VBP, VIII:14. VB to DB, 16 August 1974, VBP, VIII:19. VB to DB, [23 December 1974], VBP, VIII:19. VB to Mildred Howard, 8 March 1969, VBP, VIII:14; VB to Mildred Howard, 7 July 1970, VBP, VIII:15. VB to Mildred Howard, 8 March 1969, VBP, VIII:14. VB to [Margaret], 20 November 1966, VBP, VIII:12. VB to Mildred Howard, 7 July 1970, VBP, VIII:15. Virginia Thayer to VB, [1974], VBP, VII:8. VB to Mary O. Barns Pittenger, 24 May 1972, VBP, VIII:17. VB to Merle Curti, 23 March 1962, State Historical Society of Wisconsin, Merle Curti Papers. VB to Ruth Roettinger, 7 March 1968, VBP, VIII:14.

Notes to pages 144–8

203

26 VB to Jackson Turner Main, 29 March 1969, VBP, VIII:14. 27 VB to Mildred Howard, 7 July 1970, VBP, VIII:15. See also the drafts in VBC, ‘Folder of Writings: Study of Origins of American Revolution – drafts.’ A handwritten passage on the land acquisitions of John and Abigail Adams is dated 18 July 1976, while a sheet of annotations on an older typescript is dated 1977 and, with a question mark, 13 March. 28 Research notebooks, VBP, VI:28. 29 See VB to Curti, 23 March 1962, State Historical Society of Wisconsin, Merle Curti Papers; VB to Bernard Perry, 13 September 1962, VBP, VIII:1. 30 John Gallman to VB, 4 November, 14 December 1965, VBC, 1:1:3. 31 Examples included Bernard B. Perry (Indiana University Press) to VB, 7 March 1966, VBP, VI:5, and Leone A. Barron (U of Massachusetts P) to VB, 31 August 1967, VBP, ibid. See also note 84 in chapter 5. 32 Frederick Ungar to VB, 26 February and 10 March 1965, 26 January 1966, VBC, 1:2:1. 33 Frederick Ungar to VB, 18 and 25 February 1966, VBC, ibid. 34 Lewis M. Wiggin to VB, 25 January 1971, 25 January 1972, VBC, 1:1:19; VB to Leonard Labaree, 13 January 1972, VBP, VIII:17. 35 VB to Charles McLean Andrews, 15 April 1923, Yale MSSA, Charles McLean Andrews Papers, folder 267. 36 VB to [Barbara], 31 May 1972, VBP, VIII:17. 37 VB to Curti, 1 March 1966, State Historical Society of Wisconsin, Merle Curti Papers. 38 Lewis M. Wiggin to VB, 25 January 1971, 25 January 1972, VBC, 1:1:19. 39 VB to [Mildred], 30 June 1960, VBP, VIII:11. 40 William S. McFeely to Stanley N. Katz, 19 January 1982, Stanley N. Katz Personal Archives; telephone interview with William S. McFeely, 9 December 1998. 41 VB to Chester Kerr, 23 May 1966, VBP, VIII:12. 42 VB to Helen [Manning], 11 July 1966, VBP, VIII:12. 43 VB to Curti, 1 March 1966, State Historical Society of Wisconsin, Merle Curti Papers; VB to Ruth [Emery], 18 December 1966, VBP, VIII:12. For Barnes’s earlier rejection of ‘crusade history,’ see VB to Edgar Robinson, 11 June 1948, VBC, 3:7:1. 44 VB to Elbridge Sibley, 24 October 1966, VBP, VIII:12; VB to DB, 20 December 1966, ibid.; VB to Edmund Morgan, 18 February 1967, VBP, VIII:13. 45 VB to Ruth [Emery], 18 December 1966, VBP, VIII:12. 46 Ibid. 47 VB to Edmund Morgan, 17 August 1966, VBP, VIII:12.

204

Notes to pages 148–52

48 VB to Curti, 14 March 1967, State Historical Society of Wisconsin, Merle Curti Papers. See also VB to Curti, 29 March 1967, ibid.; VB to Edmund Morgan, 13 May 1967, VBP, VIII:13. 49 VB, ‘Sacking of the Cities, 1967,’ 12 August 1967, VBP, VIII:13. 50 VB to DB, 29 April 1968, VBP, VIII:14. 51 VB to Elizabeth Waugh Brownlee, 1 October 1972, VBP, VIII:17. 52 VB to Helen [Manning], 11 July 1966, VBP, VIII:12. 53 VB to [Ann], 27 April 1975, VBP, VIII:20. 54 Manning to VB, 12 January 1964, VBP, IV:29. 55 Curti to VB, 20 March 1967, VBP, IV:22. 56 Ruth Roettinger to VB, 16 February 1968, VBP, IV:43. 57 Edmund Morgan to VB, 3 May 1967, VBP, IV:12. 58 Leonard Labaree to VB, 27 June 1969, VBP, IV:28. 59 Helen Taft Manning to VB, 18 May [1965], VBP, IV:29. 60 Caroline Robbins to VB, 13 April 1963, VBP, IV:26. 61 VB to Labaree, 23 April 1968, VBP, VIII:14. 62 See Novick, That Noble Dream, 377–468. 63 Interview with Nancy Devine, 10 July 1998; Anne Carey Edmonds, personal communication, 22 July 1998. 64 Telephone interview with Stanley N. Katz, 30 September 1998. 65 Bernstein, ed., Towards a New Past: Dissenting Essays in American History (New York: Pantheon Books, 1968). 66 VB to DB, 1 September 1968, VBP, VIII:14. For Lemisch’s essay, see Bernstein, Towards a New Past, 3–45. For commentary on the book’s significance and the changes in the discipline of history to which Barnes reacted, see Fitzpatrick, History’s Memory, 239–48. 67 Jack P. Greene to VB, 16 March 1962, VBP, VI:5, VB to DB, 5 November 1969, VBP, VIII:14. Greene, until he left Western Reserve University in 1965, had also been a neighbour of Donald Barnes in Cleveland. 68 VB to Bernard Bailyn, 28 July 1966, VBP, VIII:12; see also Bailyn to VB, 15 August 1966, VBP, IV:7. 69 VB to DB, 5 November 1969, VBP, VIII:14; Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1967). 70 Olson and Brown, eds, Anglo-American Political Relations, 1675–1775 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1970). 71 VB to Stanley N. Katz, 9 November 1970, Stanley N. Katz Personal Archives; Alison Gilbert Olson, ‘Anglo-American Politics, 1675–1775: Needs and Opportunities for Further Study,’ in Olson and Brown, eds, AngloAmerican Political Relations, 3–13; Stanley Nider Katz, ‘Between Scylla

Notes to pages 152–4

72

73

74

75 76

77

78 79 80 81 82

83

84 85

86 87

205

and Charybdis: James DeLancey and Anglo-American Politics in Early Eighteenth-Century New York,’ ibid., 92–108. Lawrence Henry Gipson, ‘The Imperial Approach to Early American History,’ in Ray Allen Billington, ed., The Reinterpretation of American History: Essays in Honor of John Edwin Pomfret (San Marino, CA: Huntington Library, 1966), 185–99. See also VB to Bernard Bailyn, 28 July 1966, VBP, VIII:12. VB to Wesley Frank Craven, 19 March 1968, VBP, VIII:14; Craven to VB, 25 March 1968, VBP, IV:8; Craven, The Colonies in Transition, 1660–1713 (New York: Harper and Row, 1967). Richard S. Dunn, ‘Imperial Pressures on Massachusetts and Jamaica, 1675– 1700, in Olson and Brown, eds, Anglo-American Political Relations, 222 n. 27. VB to Richard S. Dunn, 9 January 1972, VBP, VIII:17; Dunn to VB, 21 January 1972, VBC, 1:1:2. John Higham to VB, 28 June 1962, VBC, 1:1:6. See also John Higham, History: Professional Scholarship in America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1965). James Kirby Martin to VB, 29 August 1970, VBC, 1:1:8; Viola F. Barnes, ‘The Refusal of Massachusetts to Become a Part of the British Colonial System,’ in James Kirby Martin, ed., Interpreting Colonial America: Selected Readings (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1973), 204–13. Phyllis Brown to VB, 22 October 1973, VBP, IV:44. VB to Louis B. Wright, 12 February 1971, VBP, VIII:16. VB to [Ruth], 24 July 1973, VBP, VIII:18. VB to [Margaret], 20 November 1966, VBP, VIII:12. VB to Louis B. Wright, 12 February 1971, VBP, VIII:16; Deposition of VB (copy), [19 February 1971], VBP, VII:5; VB to DB, 17 June 1971, VBP, VIII:16. VB to Ruth [Emery], 21 January 1973, VBP, VIII:18; VB to Stanley N. Katz, 19 April 1973, Stanley N. Katz Personal Archives; VB to Elizabeth Waugh Brownlee, 4 March 1975, VBP, VIII:20. VB to DB, 8 May 1968, VBP, VIII:14; see also VB to ‘Mr. Fitch,’ 30 April 1967, VBP, VIII:13. VB to Stanley N. Katz, 4 May 1969, Stanley N. Katz Personal Archives; VB to DB, 27 February 1970, VBP, VIII:15; Edmonds, A Memory Book, 161–3. VB to DB, 9 November 1968, VBP, VIII:14; VB to DB, 25 June 1970, VBP, III:15. VB to DB, 10 January 1970, VBP, VIII:15.

206

Notes to pages 154–7

88 VB to Ruth [Emery], 20 January 1971, VBP, VIII:16; telephone interview with Stanley N. Katz, 30 September 1998. 89 VB to DB, 10 January 1970, VBP, VIII:15; VB to Stanley N. Katz, 4 May 1969, Stanley N. Katz Personal Archives. 90 VB to Caroline Robbins, VBP, VIII:13. 91 Berkshire Conference Newsletter, December 1970, BCP, folder 6. 92 VB to Ruth [Emery], 20 January 1971, VBP, VIII:16. On the changing role of the Berkshire Conference during the 1960s and 1970s, see Sandi E. Cooper, ‘The Shaping of a Feminist Historian,’ in Boris and Chaudhuri, eds, Voices of Women Historians, 64–5; and Zinsser, History and Feminism, 100–3. 93 VB to Louis B. Wright, 12 February 1971, VBP, VIII:16. 94 Mary S. Hartman to Berkshire Conference members, 19 March 1978, BCP, folder 6; Edmonds, A Memory Book, 168. 95 See VB to Mary O. Barns Pittenger, 24 May 1972, VBP, VIII:17; VB to Elizabeth Waugh Brownlee, 1 October 1972, ibid. 96 VB to University of Nebraska Press, 15 March 1969, VBP, VIII:14; VB to DB, 5 November 1969, ibid; Cass Grove Barns, The Sod House, 2nd ed. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1970). 97 See VB to Elizabeth Waugh Brownlee, 14 February 1970, VBP, VIII:15. 98 VB to Elizabeth Waugh Brownlee, 1 October 1972, VBP, VIII:17; VB to Brownlee, 9 and 21 June, 13 July 1973, VBP, VIII:18; VB to Marion Kivett, 15 July 1973, ibid. 99 VB to Elizabeth Waugh Brownlee, 13 July 1973, VBP, VIII:18. 100 DB to VB, 14 February, 11 April 1973, VBP, I:48. 101 VB to Elizabeth Waugh Brownlee, 13 July 1973, VBP, VIII:18. 102 DB to VB, 7 May 1964, VBP, I:43. 103 DB to VB, 25 October 1965, VBP, I:44. 104 VB to Elizabeth Waugh Brownlee, 13 July 1973, VBP, VIII:18; see also DB to VB, 11 April 1973, VBP, I:48. 105 VB to DB, 15 and 23 July 1973, VBP, VIII:18. 106 VB to Chester Kerr, 9 August 1973, VBP, VIII:18; VB to Elizabeth Waugh Brownlee, 4 and 11 November 1973, ibid. 107 Ruth [Emery] to VB, 9 November 1973, VBP, IV:23. 108 VB to DB, 22 February, 5 and 29 March, 16 August, [23 December] 1974, VBP, VIII:19. 109 VB to DB, [7 December 1974], VBP, VIII:3. This letter was dated 7 December ‘1934,’ but the contents establish that the year contains a typographical error.

Notes to pages 157–64

207

110 VB to Regina [Eisner], 15 March 1974, ibid.; VB to [Sandy], 22 February 1975, VBP, VIII:20. 111 VB to Elizabeth Waugh Brownlee, 23 February, 4 March 1975, VBP, VIII:20. 112 VB to [Sandy], 22 February 1975, VBP, VIII:20; Ruth Emery to VB, 30 November 1975, VBP, IV:23; Irma L. Rabbino to Carolyn Amussen, 3 July 1975, VBP, V:8. 113 William S. McFeely to Anne Edmonds, 29 March 1975, VBP, V:8; Irma L. Rabbino to Carolyn Amussen, 3 July 1975, ibid.; Jonathan Galassi to Irma L. Rabbino, 8 July 1975, ibid.; Irma L. Rabbino to VB, 11 July 1975, ibid. 114 Handwritten note, 18 May [1977], VBP, VIII:20. 115 William S. McFeely to Stanley Katz, 1 July 1981, Stanley Katz Personal Archives; Katz to McFeely, 16 July 1981, ibid.; telephone interview with William S. McFeely, 9 December 1998. 116 Stanley N. Katz to Stephen L. Peterson, 4 September 1979, Stanley Katz Personal Archives; also Katz to Rutherford D. Rogers, 27 July 1979, ibid. 117 Mildred S. Howard to Stanley Katz, 8 October 1979, Stanley Katz Personal Archives. Miff moved to Newtown, PA, in 1981 and died there on 10 July 1987, aged 89. Press release, 13 July 1987, MHCA, Faculty and Staff Papers, Mildred S. Howard. Chapter 7 Conclusion 1 Rosenberg, Divided Lives, 91–2. 2 Barnes, ‘Britain in the Shadow of World Revolution, 1760–1776,’ VBC, 2:4:15, p. 38; 2:5:10, p. 4. 3 E.H. Carr, What Is History? 2nd ed. (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1964), 30.

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Newspapers and Magazines Albion Argus (also entitled Boone County Argus). 1877–1914, 1932–6. Boone County Argus. See Albion Argus. Daily Nebraskan (Lincoln). 1908–9. Evening State Journal (Lincoln). 1941. Nebraska Alumnus. 1941. New York Times. 1949. Springfield Union. 1963. Yale Daily News. 1916–19. Interviews, Memoirs, Personal Communications Devine, Nancy. Interview, 10 July 1998. ‘Early American Emeriti: A Symposium of Experience and Evaluation.’ William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 41 (1984), 409–86. ‘Early American Emeriti II.’ William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 45 (1988), 517–87. ‘Early American Emeriti III.’ William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 52 (1995), 453–512. Edmonds, Anne C. Personal communication, 22 July 1998. Katz, Stanley N. Personal communication, 13 August 1998. – Telephone interview, 30 September 1998. Letters from Students of Viola F. Barnes Dorothy Hafemeyer Johnson, 14 December 1998. Vivian Snyder Hunter Nieman, 29 November 1998. Susan Eisenhart Schilling, 18 February 1999. McFeely, William S. Telephone interview, 9 December 1998. Mount Holyoke College Archives. Interview with Viola F. Barnes, 9–10 March 1972. Pugh, Wilma. Interview, 15 July 1998. Theses Ballard, J. Fred. ‘The History and Tendency of American Drama.’ [M.A. thesis: University of Nebraska, 1907.] Barnes, Viola Florence. ‘The Andros Administration in New England.’ Ph.D. dissertation: Yale University, 1919. Barns, Viola Florence. ‘The Prometheus Myth in Literature.’ M.A. thesis: University of Nebraska, 1910.

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Index

Page numbers in boldface refer to illustrations.

Abbott, Edith 181n29 Abbott, Grace 181n29 Acheson, Dean 108 Acomb, Evelyn 117 Adams, James Truslow 50–2, 56, 58, 87 Adams, John 127 Adams, Norma 94, 96 African Americans xv, xx, 154 Albion, NE xiv, 3–4, 5, 7–9, 12, 14, 15, 22, 25, 28, 60, 98, 124 Albion Argus 4, 27 Albion Milling Company 4, 14 alcohol viii, 5, 7, 47, 76, 140–1 Alpern, Sara xx Alvord, Clarence W. 132 American Association of University Women 53, 117, 149 American Culture major 82–3, 99, 108 American Historical Association xvii, xix, 31, 42, 63, 69, 72, 83–5, 86, 87, 96, 97, 102, 121, 137–8, 153, 155, 161, 162

American Historical Review 50, 51– 2, 56, 122, 138 American Revolution 24, 66, 67, 70, 106, 125, 128–9, 131–2, 136, 138, 148, 152, 156, 163, 165 Amherst, MA 95 Andrews, Charles McLean viii, xi, xii–xiii, xiii, xiv, xx, 24–5, 26, 29, 30–2, 37–9, 40, 42, 43, 48–51, 52– 8 passim, 61–2, 63, 64, 67, 68, 71, 86, 103, 104, 120, 126, 130, 136, 138, 141, 146, 149, 151–3 passim Andrews, Evangeline 43 Andros, Sir Edmund 51, 58, 152 Antler, Joyce xxi Archon Books 146 Bailey, Frank 90, 93–5 passim Bailyn, Bernard 30, 129, 151 Baker, Emerson W. xiii Ballard, Fred 19–21, 26, 99 Bancroft, George 148, 150 Barbour, Violet 93 Barman, Jean xxi

222

Index

Barnes, Donald Grove (brother) 3, 12, 14, 25–8, 31, 32–4, 35, 48, 56, 60, 61, 63, 71–3 passim, 74–6, 83, 98, 99, 122, 124–5, 126, 137, 139– 44 passim, 151, 153–5 passim, 156–7, 163 Barnes, Margaret (sister-in-law) 98–9 Barnes, Viola Florence vii–ix; summary of career xi; historiography relevant to xi–xxi; early life 3–12, 10, 11; at University of Nebraska 12–28, 23; health 15, 22, 27–8, 32, 47–8, 49, 62, 63, 74–7, 124, 136– 7, 140, 153–4, 160, 163, 201n87; research, and final manuscript 25, 31–2, 56–9, 66–8, 103, 104–6, 125–36, 138, 139, 143–50, 157–9, 163–4, 165; at Yale 29–40, 33, 36, 38, 41; early years at Mount Holyoke 40–62, 54, 57; teaching 46, 60, 69–70, 108–12, 110, 162; during 1930s 63–88, 65, 84; department chair 89–95, 91; anti-Semitic tendency 90, 149–50, 198n32; preretirement years 96–116, 101, 110, 113; post-retirement years during 1950s 116–38, 123, 134; final years 139–59, 142, 145; concluding assessment 160–6; relationship with Mildred Howard, see Howard Barns, Cass Grove (father) 3, 4–5, 6, 7, 9–12, 13–15 passim, 22, 27, 32– 4, 48, 56, 60, 72–3, 74–6 passim, 98, 155–6, 160 Barns, Frank (brother) 3, 4, 9, 32, 34, 48, 63, 74, 75, 77, 124, 157 Barns, Frank, Jr (nephew) 99 Barns, Isabella Smith (mother) 3, 4, 5–7, 27, 72–3, 75–6 Barns, Mary O. See Pittenger

Barns, Ruby (sister) 3, 7–8, 12, 14, 15, 18, 33, 63, 74–5, 76, 98, 155 Beale, Howard 51 Beard, Charles A. 128 Beard, Mary 109 Beer, George Louis 24, 30, 52 Benson, Mary Sumner 116 Berkshire Conference of Women Historians. See Berkshire Historical Conference Berkshire Historical Conference xi, xix, xxi, 63, 70, 83–6, 87, 92, 95, 96, 109, 121, 122, 137, 139, 148, 150, 154–5, 157, 159, 161, 165 Bernard, Jessie xvi Bernstein, Barton J. 151 Billias, George Athan 119 Black Masque 18, 19, 98, 160 Bond, Beverley Waugh 50 Boone County 3–4, 5, 8, 32 Boone County Argus. See Albion Argus Boorstin, Daniel 148 Bordin, Ruth xxi Boston 25, 37, 70, 77, 98 Boston marriages xvii, 79. See also intimate friendships Brebner, John Bartlet 67, 86–7 Bridenbaugh, Carl 138, 148, 152 British Museum 39, 66, 106 Brown, Louise Fargo xxi, 83, 85, 87 Brown, Richard Maxwell 151 Brownlee, Elizabeth Waugh (niece) 76, 154, 155, 157 Brown University 61 Bryan, William Jennings 5, 14 Bryn Mawr College xvii, 26, 30, 31, 35, 42–6, 52–3, 59, 81, 90, 92, 95, 137–8, 147, 148 Bute, Lord 127

Index Butterfield, Herbert 148 Caine, Barbara xx Caldwell, Howard W. 25, 31 Cambridge 55 Cambridge University Press 136 Cameron, Meribeth 116 Campbell, Mildred 85, 121 Capehart, Homer E. 107 Carr, E.H. 164 Carr, Emma Perry 39, 80, 83 Carroll, Berenice A. xiv Carter, Susan B. xvi Cather, Willa 16 Catt, Carrie Chapman xi, 97–8, 163 Chicago 20, 37 Clark, Dora Mae 136 Clark University 119 Cleveland, Grover 5 Cleveland, OH 157 Cole, Arthur C. xviii, 83 College Equal Suffrage League 18–19, 160 Colley, Linda 130–1 Colonial Society of Massachusetts 58 Colorado 20 Columbia University 30, 43, 52, 67, 77, 116, 121, 154 Comstock, Ada Louise 179n2 Connecticut 79, 85, 122, 146; history of 30 Cornell University 29, 55, 104 Cornhusker 19 Cornwallis, Charles, first Marquess Cornwallis 124, 125 Council of Learned Societies 61, 63 Cramer, Frederick 90, 95, 96, 116 Crane, Verner 61 Craven, Wesley Frank 152

223

Curti, Merle 51, 69–70, 71, 87, 100, 102, 107, 116, 118, 120, 129, 144, 147–50 passim Daily Nebraskan 20, 21 Davidson, Philip 132 Declaratory Act 127 Democratic party 5, 32, 71 Depression of 1930s. See Great Depression Des Jardins, Julie xix discrimination, gender xvi, xviii, xix, 29, 34, 35, 154–5, 159, 197n32 Dominion of New England xii, 32, 50, 56–8, 59, 70, 152, 162 Dominion of New England xi, xii, 52, 56–9, 102, 130, 138, 146, 152, 153, 162, 163 Dunn, Richard S. 152 Durand, Dana 94, 95 Dzuback, Mary Ann xvii Early, Frances H. xxi Edmonds, Anne Carey xviii, 126, 157, 158 Egerton, H.E. 56 Eisenstadt, A.S. xx, 67 Ellis, Ellen 43, 52, 53, 81, 82, 90 Ellis, Joseph 158 Emery, Ruth 157 English Historical Review 56 English Revolution of 1688–9 58, 138 Equal Rights Amendment xv Fay, Sidney 60 feminism xiv, xv, xvi, xx, 18–19, 40, 92–3, 111, 139, 154–5, 159, 161. See also suffragism First World War xv, xvi, 32–4, 75

224

Index

Fiske, John 51 Fitzpatrick, Ellen xx Fling, Fred Morrow 25 Florence (Italy) 58, 105–6 Foord, Archibald S. 132, 135 France 60 Frankfort, Roberta xii Franklin, Benjamin 127 Freedman, Estelle xv, xxi Freiberg, Malcolm 120 George III 66, 124, 127, 128, 130–1, 132, 135, 136, 148, 164 Georgia, history of 109 Germany 60 GI Bill 117–20 Gipson, Lawrence Henry 67, 121–2, 130, 132, 148, 152 Glazier, Penina Migdal xvi, xviii Goggin, Jacqueline xviii Gordon, Linda xx Graduate Women’s Club, Yale 34 Graham, Patricia Albjerg xvi Grattan, Henry 93 Great Depression 59, 63, 76, 121 Green, Constance 117 Greene, Evarts 52, 116 Greene, Jack P. 130, 138, 151 Grenville, George 128 Grenville, Richard, second Earl Temple 127 Guggenheim Foundation, Fellowship 59, 61–2, 64, 66, 71, 126 Hahn, Dorothy 39 Halifax, NS 69 Ham, Roswell G. 79–81, 82, 89–90, 93–6 passim, 116 Handler, Bonnie S. xvii Harvard University 20, 24–5, 26, 27,

30–2 passim, 40, 60, 61, 102, 129, 141, 149 Harvard University Press 135 Hastings, Margaret xviii, 43 Hesseltine, William B. 40, 76 Higham, David 153 Holmes, Louise vii–viii Holmes, Roger W. vii–viii, 141 Horne, David 132–3 Horowitz, Helen Lefkovitz xviii, xxi Houghton Mifflin 157 Howard, Mildred (Miff) viii, 20, 56, 63, 77–9, 78, 87, 98, 99–102, 106, 114, 115, 122–4, 123, 139, 140, 141–3, 142, 149, 157, 158, 159, 162 Hughan, Jessie Wallace xxi Humphreys, Robin 132 ‘imperial school’ xi, xii, xiii, xx, 30, 31, 103, 130, 131–2, 136–8 passim, 152, 164 Indiana 4, 107 Institute of Early American History and Culture 103, 122, 147 Institute for Historical Research 133 intimate friendships between women xiv, xv–xvi, xvii, 12, 79, 162 Iowa 99 Jamieson, J. Franklin 128 Jennings, Francis 119 Jensen, Merrill 129 Johns Hopkins University 30 Johns Hopkins University Press 144 Johnson, Richard R. xiii, xx, 30 Johnson, Ruth 12–13, 15, 19 Judson, Margaret 85

Index Kaplan, Louis 40, 76 Kappa Kappa Gamma 16, 18, 19, 95, 98, 160 Kappa Sigma 20 Katz, Stanley 141, 151, 158; foreword by vii–ix Kellogg, Louise Phelps 72, 80–1 Kendall, Elaine xviii Kennedy, John F. 147–9 passim, 156 Kerber, Linda 129 Kerr, Chester 147 Kimball, Elisabeth G. xviii, 43, 117 Knopf, Alfred A. 126 Korean War 118, 119 Labaree, Leonard 51, 69, 135, 150 Lakeville, CT 85 Legge, Francis xii, 69 Lehigh University 67, 121 Lemisch, Jesse 129, 151 Lerner, Gerda xiv–xv, xv Lewis, Fulton, Jr 107–8 Lincoln, NE xiv, 3, 7, 9, 12–16 passim, 20–5 passim, 28, 34, 47, 64, 98, 99 London 5, 25, 30, 34, 53, 55, 58, 59, 61, 64, 66, 68, 69, 89, 105–7, 121, 129, 133, 141, 144, 149, 153, 158 Long, Huey 70 Loomis, Louise Ropes 83 Lovejoy, David S. 119 Loyalists, Loyalism xii, 66–7, 130 Lyon, Mary 40, 154 Macaulay, Catherine 106, 130 McFeely, William S. 140, 157–8 McGiffert, Michael 119 McKinley, William 5, 8 Madison, NE 60, 73 Main, Jackson Turner 119, 144

225

Maine 48 Manning, Helen Taft 31, 137–8, 149, 150 Marks, Jeannette xviii, 72, 80 Maryland 143 Massachusetts, history of 25, 31, 49, 56, 59, 60, 109 Methodist Episcopal Church, Methodism 5, 47 Milan 58 Miller, Perry 102, 120 Mitchell, Lucy Sprague xxi Moe, Henry A. 126 Monroe, Harriet 37 Morgan, Edmund S. 129, 131–6, 137, 147, 149–50, 158 Morgan, Helen M. 131 Morison, Samuel Eliot 50–1, 61, 64 Morris, Richard B. 121, 197n32 Morrison, Alva 80 Mortar Board Honor Society 98 Mount Allison University xii, xiii Mount Holyoke College vii–viii, xi, xiii, xiv, xv, xvi, xvii, xviii, 29, 31, 39, 40–7, 52, 53–6, 60, 62, 63, 68, 69, 71, 72, 75–7 passim, 79, 80–3 passim, 85, 87, 89, 93, 102, 106, 108, 109, 112, 115, 116, 118, 135, 137, 140, 141, 149, 151, 154, 157, 158, 161, 162; department of history xvii, 42–6, 71–2, 81–2, 89–97, 104, 112, 116–18, 162 Namier, Lewis 125, 128, 131–2, 136 Nash, Gary 129 Nebraska viii, xi, xviii, 3–28 passim, 34, 37, 43, 68, 72, 73, 75, 76, 98, 99, 124, 125, 161–2 Nebraska State Historical Society xiv Neilson, Nellie xvii–xviii, xix, 31, 39

226

Index

objectivity xix–xx, 120, 150, 159, 164 Olsen, Deborah M. xviii Olson, Alison Gilbert 151 Omaha, NE 7–9 passim, 24 Osgood, Herbert Levi 24, 30, 31, 52, 153 Oxford University Press 136, 147

Palmer, Alice Freeman xxi, 53, 59 Palmieri, Patricia A. xvii, 39, 42 Pares, Richard 132 Paris 53, 58, 105 Park, Maude Wood 18–19 Pennsylvania, history of 32 PhD degree xvi, 16, 24, 25, 28, 29, 31, 34, 35, 37, 40, 42, 49 Phi Beta Kappa 21 Phips, Sir William xiii, 60–1, 102 Pitt, William 124 Pittenger, Mary O. Barns (niece) 155 Pittsburgh 16 Plymouth colony 14, 70 Poetry 37 Pollard, A.F. 59, 64 Pomfret, John E. 152 Populism 5 Pound, Louise 16–20, 17, 22, 35, 62, 64, 71, 97–8, 160, 165 Pound, Olivia 16, 98 Prentice, Alison xii Priestley, Joseph 106, 127, 130 Princeton University Press 136 professionalization of history xvi, xviii–xix, 30 Progressive Era xvi, xx, 7, 35 Public Archives of Canada 105 Public Record Office 30, 31, 39, 53, 59, 64, 66, 106, 149 Pugh, Wilma 95, 96 Purington, Florence 80 Puritans, Puritanism 58, 102–3, 109, 159 Putnam, Bertha xvii–xviii, 42–3, 44, 52, 59, 63, 64, 81, 82, 89–90, 96, 161

pacifism 40

Quebec 143

42–3, 44, 46, 48, 52–6, 54, 55–6, 62–4 passim, 71–2, 79, 81, 82, 89– 90, 92–6 passim, 161 Nettels, Curtis P. 104 Nevins, Allan 108, 120 New Deal 70 New England, history of xi, xii, 50, 58, 59, 67, 68, 70, 102, 103, 120, 159, 165 New England Quarterly xii, xiii, 60– 1, 69 New Hampshire 76 New Haven, CT 25, 26, 32, 150 New Jersey 83 New York (City) 16, 97, 104, 121, 126 New York (State) 5, 83, 151 Nicolson, Marjorie Hope xxi, 59, 61– 2, 64, 71, 80 Nixon, Richard 71, 154, 157 Northampton, MA 46, 60, 72, 98 North Haven, CT 146 Norton, Mary Beth 129 Norton, W.W. (publisher) 87, 104 Notestein, Wallace 29, 55, 61, 92, 178n2 Nova Scotia, history of xii, xiii, 67, 69, 109 Novick, Peter xix–xx

Index Radcliffe College 26 Republican Party 9, 19, 107 Reynolds, Beatrice 117 Richardson, Gertrude xxi riding school, Mount Holyoke 56 Ritcheson, Charles R. 132 Robbins, Caroline 59, 121, 122, 137, 148, 150, 154 Roberts, Barbara xxi Rome 58, 106 Roosevelt, Eleanor 97 Roosevelt, Franklin Delano 70 Root, Winfred T. 24, 25, 31–2, 61 Rosenberg, Rosalind xii, xv, 35, 161 Rossiter, Margaret xvi, xvii Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 127, 128 Rowse, A.L. 135 Royal Historical Society 69, 162 Rupp, Leila J. xvi Rutgers University 85 Salisbury, CT 85 Salk, Jonas 133 Salmon, Lucy Maynard xxi, 43–6 Schlesinger, Arthur M., Sr 61, 132 Schlesinger, Arthur M., Jr 108 Schramm, E. Frank 21 Scott, Joan Wallach xix Second World War xvi, xix, 93, 100, 103, 117, 119–20, 126, 164; veterans 117–20 Shmurak, Carole B. xvii Shoe String Press 146–7 Skinner, Constance Lindsay xxi, 180– 1n29 Sklar, Kathryn Kish xvii Slater, Miriam xvi, xviii Smith, Bonnie G. xix Smith, Hilda L. xx

227

Smith College 59, 60, 62, 69–70, 85 Smith-Rosenberg, Carroll xiv Snell, Ada 80, 83 socialism 107–8, 114, 165 Social Science Research Council 105, 106, 126 South Hadley, MA vii–viii, xi, 29, 40, 58, 60, 72, 79, 99, 115, 124, 135, 159 Springfield, MA 47, 70 Stamp Act 127, 131 State University of New York (Stony Brook) 144 Steele, Ian K. xiii Stock, Phyllis xii Stockbridge, MA 85 Stuard, Susan Mosher xvii–xviii suffragism xi, xvi, 5–7, 18–19, 21, 92, 161 Tatlock, Jessie 81, 82, 90, 95 Tawney, R.H. 125 Taylor, Verta xvi Thomas, M. Carey xxi, 53, 90 Times Literary Supplement 68 Trans-Mississippi Exposition 8 Truman, Harry S. 107, 120 Ungar, Frederick, Publishing 138, 146–7 United States history xx, 22, 24, 30, 39, 46, 53, 58, 69, 82, 83, 87, 93, 95, 96, 104, 107–8, 109, 116, 120 University of Heidelberg 16 University of London 59, 64 University of Michigan 43, 59, 64 University of Nebraska viii, xiii, xiv, xviii, 3, 12–19, 20, 21, 22–4, 25, 26, 32, 35, 39, 40, 89, 98, 160,

228

Index

161; music school 3, 12–14, 16; women at 15–16 University of Nebraska Press 155 University of North Carolina Press 87 University of Oregon 61 University of Oxford 117, 135, 149 University of Pennsylvania 35 University Press of New England 158 University of Washington 72 University of Wisconsin 24, 51, 72, 119, 129, 154 University of Wyoming 95 Van Tyne, Claude 59, 61, 64, 66–7 Van Waters, Miriam xxi Vassar College 53, 87, 93 Venice 58 Vermont 100, 143 Vietnam War 154 Walton, Andrea xxi Ware, Susan xv Washington, DC 102 Watson, J. Steven 135 Waugh, Elizabeth. See Brownlee Wellesley College xvii, 39, 42 Wells, Anna Mary xviii Wells College 55, 59 Western Reserve University 72, 83, 124, 125 Wharton, Richard 58–9, 61, 102

Wilkes, John 106, 127, 130, 164 William III 58 William and Mary Quarterly 103, 119, 131, 147 Williams, Judith Blow 121 Wilson, Mortimer 12 Wisconsin 80 Woman’s Christian Temperance Union 5 Women’s Centennial Congress xi, 97, 109 women’s colleges xiv, xvi, xvii, 18, 39, 40, 90, 117–18 Women’s Foreign Missionary Society 5, 8 women’s history xx, 68, 109–11 Wood, Doris 22 Woolley, Mary xviii, 39, 40–2, 46, 47, 53, 55, 64, 72, 79, 80 World Wide Broadcasting Corporation 70 Yale University viii, xi, xiv, 3, 25, 26, 28, 29, 30–5, 36, 40, 48, 50, 51, 59, 60, 69, 76, 79–80, 93, 115, 117, 126, 129, 131, 132, 146, 147, 149, 150, 158, 161 Yale University Press 50, 76, 126–7, 132–6, 137, 147, 149, 150, 157 YMCA 21 YWCA 18

STUDIES IN GENDER AND HISTORY General editors: Franca Iacovetta and Karen Dubinsky 1 Suzanne Morton, Ideal Surroundings: Domestic Life in a Working-Class Suburb in the 1920s 2 Joan Sangster, Earning Respect: The Lives of Working Women in Small-Town Ontario, 1920–1960 3 Carolyn Strange, Toronto’s Girl Problem: The Perils and Pleasures of the City, 1880–1930 4 Sara Z. Burke, Seeking the Highest Good: Social Service and Gender at the University of Toronto, 1888–1937 5 Lynne Marks, Revivals and Roller Rinks: Religion, Leisure, and Identity in LateNineteenth-Century Small-Town Ontario 6 Cecilia Morgan, Public Men and Virtuous Women: The Gendered Languages of Religion and Politics in Upper Canada, 1791–1850 7 Mary Louise Adams, The Trouble with Normal: Postwar Youth and the Making of Heterosexuality 8 Linda Kealey, Enlisting Women for the Cause: Women, Labour, and the Left in Canada, 1890–1920 9 Christina Burr, Spreading the Light: Work and Labour Reform in LateNineteenth-Century Toronto 10 Mona Gleason, Normalizing the Ideal: Psychology, Schooling, and the Family in Postwar Canada 11 Deborah Gorham, Vera Brittain: A Feminist Life 12 Marlene Epp, Women without Men: Mennonite Refugees of the Second World War 13 Shirley Tillotson, The Public at Play: Gender and the Politics of Recreation in Postwar Ontario 14 Veronica Strong-Boag and Carole Gerson, Paddling Her Own Canoe: The Times and Texts of E. Pauline Johnson (Tekahionwake) 15 Stephen Heathorn, For Home, Country, and Race: Constructing Gender, Class, and Englishness in the Elementary School, 1880–1914 16 Valerie J. Korinek, Roughing It in the Suburbs: Reading Chatelaine Magazine in the Fifties and Sixties 17 Adele Perry, On the Edge of Empire: Gender, Race, and the Making of British Columbia, 1849–1871 18 Robert A. Campbell, Sit Down and Drink Your Beer: Regulating Vancouver’s Beer Parlours, 1925–1954 19 Wendy Mitchinson, Giving Birth in Canada, 1900–1950 20 Roberta Hamilton, Setting the Agenda: Jean Royce and the Shaping of Queen’s University

21 Donna Gabaccia and Franca Iacovetta, eds, Women, Gender, and Transnational Lives: Italian Workers of the World 22 Linda Reeder, Widows in White: Migration and the Transformation of Rural Women, Sicily, 1880–1920 23 Terry Crowley, Marriage of Minds: Isabel and Oscar Skelton Re-inventing Canada 24 Marlene Epp, Franca Iacovetta, and Frances Swyripa, eds, Sisters or Strangers? Immigrant, Ethnic, and Racialized Women in Canadian History 25 John G. Reid, Viola Florence Barnes, 1885–1979: A Historian’s Biography