Girl Sleuth (10 page)

For her major, Harriet chose music and English composition, but it was the history of religion courses she began to take in her sophomore year that she always counted as her favorite. In them, she believed, she had learned that “if one strips each of the great religions down to its basic concept one will find that the philosophy is the same: a reverence for deity, kindness to one's fellow-man, and a belief in life after death. It is only when man himself adds a lot of superfluous ideas and customs that misunderstandings occur, even to a point of bloodshed. The answer is tolerance.” These were the tenets of a noble life, and she held herself to them strictly.

The rigors of a Wellesley education were far greater than those of Barringer High School. Harriet was, by her own account, “an average student because of too many other interests.” Among other things, she was deeply curious about the suffrage movement. She was an enthusiastic participant in the activities of the Wellesley Equal Suffrage League, which invited prestigious speakers on the issue and took note as voting rights were granted, state by state, over the course of Harriet's four years at Welles-ley—Washington in 1910, followed by California in 1911; Arizona, Kansas, and Oregon in 1913; and in 1914, Montana and Nevada. At one point, the league went so far as to assert that “in any non-military country, woman suffrage is natural, logical and right.” In early 1912, just after Chinese women were given the vote—a short-lived gesture toward equality that was taken away again almost immediately—the group implored in the
News:
“Let us . . . be glad for them, and then let us be a little bit ashamed of our own position in contrast, and buckle to change it! American women have public spirit and patriotism. Can we better show it than by assuming responsibility—and being worthy of it?”

After writing home exuberantly about her activities with the league at one point, Harriet received a chastening, if loving, letter from her father, reminding her that while suffrage was certainly important, she should not let it distract her from her studies. Her passion ran in the family, apparently. Edna wrote to her enthusiastically and often about the movement in Harriet's first years at school, saying gleefully at one point: “Are you a suffragette?
I am!
” Both girls were electrified when NAWSA announced plans to disrupt the inauguration of Woodrow Wilson—Progressive candidate Theodore Roosevelt had run and lost on the first pro–equal voting rights platform in history—with the March for Woman Suffrage. Scheduled to arrive in Washington on March 3, 1913, it was designed specifically to attract an enormous amount of attention from the press waiting to cover Wilson.

On February 12, 1913, twelve marchers left New York City to walk down to Washington for the parade, traveling through New Jersey on their way. “Next Wednesday morning between 9:30 + 10, the walking suffragettes are going to pass through Newark,” Edna wrote to Harriet, with whom she was carrying on a lively exchange about the upcoming event. “Mrs. Harris has invited me to see them . . . I think I'll join the procession and walk to Washington eh! Meet my old friends Taft and Wilson halfway!”

When the New York marchers reached Washington, they joined more than five thousand other protestors behind the beautiful and charismatic Inez Milholland, who led the parade down Pennsylvania Avenue dressed in a white cape and riding a white horse. Tiara on her head, dark curls tumbling down her back, she brought her true believers to a stop on the steps of the Treasury Building, where they performed an allegorical pageant that depicted “those ideals toward which both men and women have been struggling through the ages and toward which, in cooperation and equality, they will continue to strive.” Among the crowd were famed reporter Nelly Bly (whose piece on the march ran under the headline “
SUFFRAGISTS ARE MEN'S SUPERIORS
”) and Helen Keller, who was scheduled to speak but was so exhausted by the effort required to cut through the masses to reach her post that she had to cancel. Thousands of men in town for the inauguration the next day had begun to heckle the marchers just a few blocks into the procession, shouting indecencies and, among other things, “Where are your skirts?” The disorderly conduct prompted a Senate hearing in the following days to determine what had gone wrong. There, one panelist pronounced: “There would be nothing like this happen if you would stay at home.”

As for Wilson, he was warned in a letter carried by the New York marchers that advocates of suffrage would “watch your administration with an intense interest such as has never before been focused upon the administration of any of your predecessors.” Alas, the missive was never delivered, and when approached by a delegation from the organization after he took office, Wilson, hedging, claimed that he had never even given much thought to the matter. It was hardly surprising, given his reaction to the presence of the March for Women Suffrage at the time of his inauguration. Arriving in town to accept the presidency on the day of the march, his staff was so unaware that one of them actually asked the police where all the people were. Though Wilson would eventually come to support suffrage, it would take another seven years before the vote was finally granted during his last year in office.

Cosseted up at Wellesley, Harriet could not participate in the march. But she continued to do her part with the Equal Suffrage League. She also enjoyed numerous other extracurricular activities. Paramount among her nonacademic pursuits was her role at the Wellesley Press Board, first as an enthusiastic member after its founding in 1912 and eventually as president. As it was at all of the elite eastern schools, image was of enormous importance to Wellesley, and the Press Board, like similar organizations at other schools, was designed to control the flow of news about the school to the outside world. It supplied local newspapers, primarily the
Boston Globe
and the major New York papers, with approved items about the goings-on at the cloistered women's college in the Massachusetts hills. If a student wished to send an item to her own hometown paper, she had to join the board temporarily and have the contents vetted. Prior to its formation, according to the
Wellesley News,
information got out through “the disconnected work of a number of students engaged by the newspapers for which they reported, and responsible only to these papers.” In other words, the school had no say in how it was being depicted to the outside world. Among recent infractions at the time of the Press Board's creation was a story in a California newspaper characterizing a student who had recently been elected a fire captain for one of the college houses as “[a] Wellesley girl who ran the only hose-wagon in the country driven by a woman.”

Clearly this kind of vile misrepresentation would not do. As a member of the Press Board, Harriet sent carefully worded news items about her beloved school to the
Boston Globe,
the
Newark Sunday Call,
and the
Newark Evening News.
An economics class had taught her about the plight of women factory workers and taken her on a tour through some of Boston's housing projects, but she was so sheltered from the world of financial concerns that she had never seen a check. When her first payment arrived from the
Boston Globe
in that form, she believed it was “for information only” and pasted it into the pages of her memory book as a souvenir. Though she later peeled it out, leaving an empty space in her book that always made her laugh in later years, she had clearly never experienced the necessity of earning a living.

In the spring of her junior year, Harriet, who had often found the task of warding off outside reporters and photographers in the name of school honor difficult, was watching an outdoor play being performed on the college green from a hidden vantage point in the school's woods. Apparently, she was not the only one who found it a choice spot for gathering material for an article.
She became aware, suddenly, that two newspaper photographers were also secreted in the foliage, preparing to take a picture of the girls onstage, who were dressed in tights. In addition to the other restrictions, Wellesley girls were not allowed to perform in men's clothing if men were to be present in the audience. Under no circumstances were they to be photographed wearing even pants, much less tights. “At that time Wellesley . . . even had the girls standing behind tables or stone walls when the town photographer came,” Harriet remembered. She immediately took the interlopers to task, waving a threatening finger at them and crying out, “You can't do that!” As she herself told the end of the story: “A week later I saw myself in a newsreel with the title ‘Wellesley Press Board member tries to stop the above picture.' The above picture was a scene of Wellesley girls cavorting on the green in pants. No one ever reprimanded me, but I learned a lesson which has been invaluable to me in being interviewed: ‘Don't threaten the media!'”

Though the girls were not allowed to be photographed wearing masculine clothing, according to the mores of their time, they never shied away from filling in for their missing beaux on social occasions. As an editorial in the school paper chided, “Don't kiss each other in the public highway. It's awful to see a woman doing a man's work.” Single-sex dances where the girls dressed up as men to “escort” their partners were de rigueur, as men—fathers excepted—were not allowed on campus. On Sundays they could not be entertained even in the village. The first great exception came in the winter of Harriet's junior year, when a senior dance with men was planned for the first time. “Tomorrow night is the Glee Club Concert and the Senior Dance, and of all the excitement!” one thrilled girl wrote home to her mother. “Of course the faculty are still rather careful about the whole thing,—make them stop at midnight, etc.” In preparation for the big occasion, the faculty passed a rule that all dancers must maintain a three-inch distance from one another, so as to be “preventive of the ‘turkey trot,' the ‘bunny hug' and other recent substitutes for the staid old waltz and two-step . . . Some of the girls are considering the availability of crinoline gowns as a precautionary measure.”

When the time came for Harriet's own senior dance, she invited Russell Vroom Adams, her old childhood playmate, to be her escort. He was so enthusiastic that he danced his date into a punch bowl at one point, leaving her little doubt as to his eventual intentions. But the dances were a rare exception; generally speaking, the sexes were not allowed to mingle unless in the presence of the proper chastening influence. “Young men who call on the girl students at Wellesley Sunday nights must attend divine worship in Memorial Chapel under a new rule just put into effect by the faculty,” a Boston newspaper reported in 1914, adding grimly, “The young men must sit through the service.”

For the most part, Harriet's years at Wellesley were uneventful and enriching. The spring semester of her final year, however, would give her the chance to prove herself to her parents and everyone else in a very different manner and under circumstances no one could ever have imagined.

In the earliest hours of March 17, 1914, around 4:30 in the morning, two of Harriet's fellow Wellesley seniors awoke to the smell of smoke emanating from the Zoology Laboratory across from their room. Seeing a red glow through the glass transom above the door, they jumped from their beds and ran to alert the night watchman and the college registrar. Another girl who had awakened in the meantime ran to a lower floor and rang the great Japanese dinner bell until the actual fire alarm bell could be reached. The other residents of College Hall, Wellesley's main building, filed out calmly. For all anyone knew, this was simply a drill and, as such, they reacted without panic. Some of them grabbed coats or robes, but many were barefoot and clad only in nightdresses as they made their way out into the foggy early morning.

By the time they reached the first floor of the massive brick-and-wood building, flames were already eating away at the upper floors. Within ten minutes of the first alarm, all the students were shivering in the chilly March morning as they watched their possessions go up in tongues of flame and smoke. Later the head of College Hall, Olive Davis, recalled the moment vividly:

 

What few words can picture that scene forever etched on the mind of each who shared in this experience? Outside the darkness and the stillness of night; within, the light of flames and the clang of the fire alarm, the crackle of the fire's steady onslaught, the falling embers, the students' white, terror-stricken faces as they realized the danger, the quiet of voices broken only by muffled answers to the roll call, the quick, decisive order, the unhesitating obedience to recognized authority, the passing of the students out through the north center windows, the breathless, frightened run through smoky, deserted halls for the missing seven, the sharp order “Dangerous, All out,” and College Hall was gone.

 

As the uncontrolled flames blew from west to east, all students and faculty were accounted for, and the crowd fell silent.

Then, all at once, several faculty members came to the realization that the ground floor of College Hall contained not only student records, class schedules, and the entire life's work of many professors, but also cherished antiques and furniture that had been part of the school since its founding. They dashed into the inferno to try to save what they could. In their wake, groups of students, including Harriet, who had rushed over from her dorm, began to form long lines—bucket brigades of a sort—from the smoldering first floor of College Hall to the library next door. As the columns of girls grew longer, faculty members inside the burning building began to hand their rescued treasures out to the eager pairs of hands, which passed them, girl by girl, to safety in the library. Before long, the students could see that there would not be enough time to save everything, and several of them joined the faculty inside the building to aid the process. Among them was Harriet, who later won a medal of honor for her bravery and was commended by a fellow student, Hazel Cooper, in a Newark newspaper account of the fire printed the next day: