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This 224th Commencement marks the sesquicentennial of the college graduation of the first women at the University of Vermont as well as New England. 


Lida Mason (Hodge) and Ellen Eliza Hamilton (Woodruff) received Bachelor of Arts degrees in 1875. 


One-hundred and fifty years ago, as they walked across the Green to receive their diploma, they also held the distinction of being the first female Phi Beta Kappas in the nation. 


In 1872, Lida Mason entered the freshman class at the start of the winter term. For the remainder of that year, she was the only woman at UVM.  


One 1916 fraternity publication, the Kappa Alpha Theta, noted that, upon arrival, Mason “was regarded by the conservative friends of the college and by the townspeople as somewhat of a monstrosity” (Becque 2018).   


Miss Ellen E. Hamilton joined Mason in the sophomore class during the fall of 1872. It would be the start of a lifelong friendship. 


Today, we examine and celebrate their legacy, as well as the conditions under which it became possible, and with an eye towards the future. 

 

Forever Entwined: the University of Vermont Votes on Women


Lida Mason was born in Jersey City, N.J. on September 7, 1849, to Arnold G. and Maria B. Mason. After her degree, she taught school for a year, and married dentist S. D. Hodge. They stayed on in Burlington, where they raised two daughters, both of whom would become teachers.  


Mason remained active in her community and was described as an ardent and thoughtful reader. She dedicated her time to the Children’s Home for Destitute Children and otherwise went on to lead, as it reads in her letters, a rewarding domestic life. She died from arteriosclerosis at her home on 29 Wilson Street in Burlington on Independence Day of 1921.  


Ellen Eliza Hamilton, who went by Nellie, hailed from Rochester, Vt., born to Dr. Henry W. and Eliza Graves Hamilton on November 14, 1853. After her undergraduate degree, Ellen Eliza Hamilton went on to marry another Phi Beta Kappa – Frank E. Woodruff – in 1883, earn a master’s also at UVM, and teach Latin and mathematics at Bowdoin College for 35 years. They had three children, and many grandchildren, many of whom joined her in the ranks of Catamount. Hamilton passed away on November 28, 1933, in Brattleboro, Vt., also from heart disease and cerebral arteriosclerosis. 


During their time here, both women pursued a Classical Course of study, which then included courses in English literature, modern languages, ancient texts, and natural sciences. 


They helped form the Alpha Rho Society in 1874, a group formed to meet the “need of a more general culture than [was] afforded by one curriculum of study” at UVM.


Alpha Rho joined the national ‘fraternity’ for women, Kappa Alpha Theta, in 1881 (Woodruff 39).  


Recruitment to the all-male Phi Beta Kappa was predicated on merit.

Source: UVM Silver Special Collections
Source: UVM Silver Special Collections

In 1875, when the highest marks went to two women, the then all-male Phi Beta Kappas faced a unique conundrum: favor gender as criteria to entry, or merit-based achievement? The fraternity men voted for the latter. The decision was unanimous. 


Mason's and Hamilton’s lives would be forever entwined. Hamilton would be listed in Mason’s obituary ("Ellen Eliza Hamilton of Brandon, Vt., now Mrs. F. E. of Brunswick, Me.”). One could not speak of one without mentioning the other.  


It seems they preferred it this way. Their lifelong friendship is made palpable through the troves of archived letters at the UVM Jack and Shirley Silver Special Collections. It is a true joy to sift through.  


One-hundred and fifty years later, Mason’s and Hamilton’s lives, and friendship, remain entwined: in legacy; in the University Residence Halls bearing their names; and in an award, with both of their names, gifted annually to a Women’s and Gender Studies student for academic excellence.  


The University of Vermont Shifts With the 19th Century


Formalizing women’s education centered on questions of propriety and place. It forced UVM and surrounding communities, as well as the nation at large, to confront whether a “woman’s sphere” is circumscribed.


And if so, must it be confined to the home? Can a university hold space for women, as they had for men? And embedded in these questions, but less overt at the time – which women? 


Nationally, the exclusion of women in higher education in the United States began to shift in the mid-19th century. A drop in student enrollment at UVM in the 1860s and 1870s precipitated these reforms in enrollment criteria (Woodruff 30).


Mason and Hamilton would be the first two of 118 white women to receive degrees from UVM between 1875 and 1900. That's a contrast to today’s demographics, broadly defined as 61% female and 39% male across races and ethnicities. 


Of those 118 women, 116 responded to a survey which found that: 91 (77%) alumnae sought work, even if temporarily, after graduation. By 1900, 45 (38%) alumnae had married, six (13%) of whom maintained a career. Of the 72 alumnae who did not marry men within this time frame, sixty-two (82%) maintained careers (Woodruff 37).


 Of the total sixty-eight who maintained careers, married or single, sixty-two (91%) were “teachers, teaching principals, preceptresses of female seminaries or teaching assistants or instructors in primary, secondary, or normal schools” (Woodruff 38). It was considered the most acceptable alternative to domesticity. 


Nineteenth-century restrictions on women’s professions limited their access to post-graduate degrees until 1890. Even so, women who received degrees in law or medicine faced restrictions on options to practice their professions for decades (Woodruff 45). 


While Mason’s and Hamilton’s legacies were groundbreaking in Vermont, as well as across the whole of New England, they were preceded by other public universities, such as the University of Iowa (1855), the University of Michigan (1870), the University of Arkansas (1872), and the University of Wisconsin (1874).


Oberlin College first opened its doors to Black men in 1835. It would begin to admit all women two years later, in 1837, and earned the distinction as the first degree-bearing institution of higher learning to do so. But it came with a caveat: on Mondays, instead of classes, women were relegated to doing male students’ laundry (Parker 6).


Remarkable cultural transitions and progress aren’t ever met without incident or challenge, even on the individual level. One particular letter between Mason and Hamilton speaks to this kind of contradiction:


You will not teach anymore will you Nell? You must get domesticated my dear. Not that I think you wild exactly but you have taught long enough.


I was glad to know that you were enjoying your work however. I was interested in your account of your work. Are you lady-principall, Nell? If so it must be quite a responsible position though, I should imagine, a pleasant one.


Lida Mason Hodge to Ellen Hamilton


May 10, 1881


For the decades that followed Mason’s and Hamilton’s UVM graduation, most Ivy League schools still refused – and would not open their doors to women until the 1960s and ’70s. Columbia University would not budge for another 111 years, finally admitting women in 1983. 


All the while, Sister Schools as well as Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) were established in response, offering young people affected by these discriminatory practices the intellectual rigor, community, and mobility otherwise denied them.


Paving the Way to Higher Learning for Women and Minorities in the US


In the early 19th century, white women of society with an interest in furthering their education and intellectual pursuits, or who longed to opt out of the traditional homemaker path altogether, were met with few choices: a handful of coed institutions, some single-sexed institutions, or seminary schools. 


Black women and children faced even fewer choices. 


School segregation dates back to Colonial America. Black and brown children were often segregated out of one-room schoolhouses built for white children, left to shape their intellects outside of formal institutions of schooling. 


Indigenous children were often forcibly removed from their homes and into boarding schools, aimed at annihilating their native culture (Mejia). For Black children, early schools led by religious organizations paved the way. At certain institutions, however, these lessons were delivered alongside proslavery ideology (Forde). 


Some of these efforts towards formalizing education were also stymied by anti-literacy laws in 1740, which prohibited enslaved African people from formal education. Beyond learning to read and write, it deemed practices – such as harvesting food, traveling freely, assembling groups, and earning money for their work -- as “rebellious,” and illegal. First passed in South Carolina, these laws extended to other confederate states through 1834.


The African Free School was founded by the New York Manumission Society in 1794 and offered primary education. The school would be absorbed into the New York City public school system in 1835. The Civil War would not end for another three decades. 


The first person of African descent to graduate from an American College was Alexander Twilight, who earned his BA from Middlebury College in 1823. Curiously, they would not graduate a woman, May Belle Chellis, until 1886 – and their valedictorian at that. 


UVM graduated its first Black student, Andrew Harris, in 1838 – 37 years before Mason and Hamilton. He leaves behind a legacy as an abolitionist, whose significance is commemorated by the Andrew Harris Commons on the UVM campus.


His tenure, however, was not without discrimination. Graduating students of Harris’ time were expected to deliver an oration at graduation; Harris was barred by his classmates due to the color of his skin. He would deliver a powerful speech a year later, to the American Anti-Slavery Society’s annual meeting in New York in May of 1839, marking Harris’ arrival “as a national figure among black intellectuals and reformers,” says historian Kevin Thornton (Johnson).


Once settled at UVM, it seems Mason’s and Hamilton’s tenure was met with less resistance. Letters speak to friendships with classmates and professors beyond graduation, as well as an experience of mutual understanding and support (Woodruff 48). 


Their experiences paved the way for Sarah Martin and Effie Moore, graduates of 1876, as they did for so many others at UVM and New England. Edna Hall Brown would be UVM's first Black woman graduate, with the class of 1930.


Before Mason and Hamilton, the young women of Vermont were relegated to female seminary schools, if their intellectual aspirations were at all encouraged. Like early schools for Black children, most had religious foundations, or were otherwise focused on training women in ‘women’s work.’ The Burlington Female Seminary, one of several in Vermont, was founded by John K. Converse in 1835, and offered young women “training for their ‘station’ in life” (Woodruff, 25-26). 


Vermont's Emma Willard established two forerunners to higher education and championed a woman’s right to its equal access in the earlier half of the nineteenth century.


Landmark federal policies, like the second Morrill Act of 1890 “required that states consider black students equally or found separate land-grant schools for them,” thus forcing states and schools otherwise protracting the admission of Black students (Archie). 


Notably, this Morrill – Justin S. Morrill, United States Senator -- was a University of Vermont Trustee from 1865 to 1898. He sat among the eighteen UVM Trustees tasked with voting on the admission of Mason and Hamilton into the University, and proposed many other reforms implemented at UVM during the 1860s and 1870s (Woodruff 31).


While the all-male Trusteeship then did not seek to educate women out of traditional gender roles, they believed “women shared a ‘rational humanity’ with men,” and challenged some of the principles upon which seminary education was founded (Woodruff 26).


The first Native American to graduate from an American institution of higher learning was Caleb Cheeshahteaumuck, from Harvard University in 1665. The University, in the Charter of 1650, pledged to uphold the “education of English and Indian youth” and did so through the “Indian College,” a separate building in Harvard Yard. It would take until 1970, however, for that program to center itself around Native American issues.


The Supreme Court's 1954 ruling on Brown vs. The Board of Education of Topeka struck down the ‘separate but equal’ doctrine and marked a pivotal moment in educational equity in America as well as its Civil Rights movement.


The First of Many at UVM


In this march towards equity, Lida Mason and Ellen Eliza Hamilton Woodruff share a linked legacy, one also entwined with Edna Hall Brown’s and Andrew Harris’, as well as the legion of firsts to break through systemic exclusion in spaces of formalized education and beyond -- across the nation. 


We hold their legacies close, and feel uplifted by them, as we look towards the good work ahead.


Read More about Notable Figures and History at UVM



Sources

First in Class: Lida Mason Hodge and Ellen Eliza Hamilton Woodruff, Class of 1875

Lisa Wartenberg Vélez

May 16, 2024

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