By John Woodford

"For almost all middle-class women of Alice Freeman Palmer's generation, combining marriage and a career was an impossibility," writes Ruth Bordin in the first biography of alumna Alice Freeman Palmer, Class of 1876, one of the nation's most influential figures in shaping the higher education of women.

In a stirring biography (Alice Freeman Palmer: The Evolution of a New Woman, Ann Arbor, University of Michigan Press, 1993), Bordin traces Palmer's evolution as a "new breed" of woman known then as "the New Woman."

"The phrase New Woman was coined originally by Henry James," Bordin writes, to describe rich, sensitive and independent American expatriates in Europe, like James's heroine Daisy Miller, who asserted, "I've never allowed a gentleman to dictate to me or to interfere with anything I do."

In the United States, Bordin says, the term "was attached to the new American professional women emerging in increasing numbers in the last two decades of the 19th century." A college education was usually the passport to New Woman status, and Michigan, with graduates like Palmer and her contemporaries Lucy Maynard Salmon, Angie Chapin, Mary Marston, Eliza Mosher, Olive San Louie Anderson, Dr. Amanda Sanford, Octavia Bates, Sarah Dix Hamlin and Cora Benneson, probably launched more New Women into education, the professions, social service work and volunteer efforts than any other school in that era.

In June 1872, Alice Freeman and her father, James, arrived in Ann Arbor during commencement exercises to see if the University of Michigan was the right choice for her.

Alice grew up in a village near Binghamton, New York, and although her father was a physician, he had only recently switched from farming to being a country doctor. His cash income was probably around $400 a year, says Bordin, and an out-of state U-M student faced approximately $350 in annual college costs.

An Elite Group
Few women went to college in those days, especially if, like Alice, they had a brother. Women made up about 21 percent of all college students in the 1870s, but only 0.7 percent of all American women 18 to 21 were attending college, so Alice was in an elite group. (Michigan had admitted its first woman, Madelon Stockwell, only two years before Alice's visit to campus, and she heard Stockwell deliver on of the commencement orations that June of 1872.)

Alice had already promised her parents that she would contribute to her brother Fred's tuition if they let her continue her education. (Alice did more than make good on her promise. Her father was in and out of financial difficulties throughout her life. Though suffering one of her intermittent bouts of tuberculosis, she interrupted her college career at one point to work not only for some of her tuition but to support her bankrupt parents and three younger siblings as well.)

"Alice seems not to have considered Cornell, the only private university admitting women, or Oberlin, Antioch or other coeducational denominational colleges," Bordin writes. "She looked to the new state universities, of which Michigan was the oldest and largest. Certainly it offered high-quality training. Michigan was among the most prestigious universities in the country. By the 1870s there were disciplines, such as history, in which it excelled Harvard and Yale. And it was less expensive than many of its competitors." The U-M averaged about 1,10 students in the 1870s, 3 percent of them women.

Michigan's President James Burrill Angell had just finished his first year in office, and he was known to be committed to coeducation. Bordin writes of the first meeting between Angell and the young woman who would become the first woman president of Wellesley, the first dean hired by the University of Chicago and the nation's leading figure in the education of women:

"Alice and her father were ushered on that June morning in 1872 into Angell's office, for Angell served as registrar, dean of the Literary College and professor of international law as well as president. Angell described Alice as he remembered her from that first encounter as 'a simple modest girl of 17 ... a child of much promise, possessed [of] a bright alert mind, of great energy, of quick sympathies and an instinctive desire to be helpful to others.' Angell was immediately smitten by that charismatic personality, and he was to remain her adoring friend and fervent supporter for the rest of her life."

In 1876, Alice, who had majored in history, was among three women commencement speakers, an honor that faculty and students conferred only upon popular and outstanding students.

After teaching stints in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, and Saginaw, Michigan, where her family had moved, Alice Freeman was invited in 1879 to join the faculty of four-year-old Wellesley College by its founder, Henry Durant. At first he asked her to teach mathematics but she declined. Lather that year, he asked her to teach Greek. Again she refused. But in June she accepted a professorship in history.

'A Galaxy of Giants'
Her responsibilities at Wellesley expanded so quickly that upon Durant's death in 1881, the trustees elected her president and, at the age of 26, she became the first woman to head an independent, nationally known college. "The only woman," Bordin notes, "in a galaxy of academic giants, all of whom were making pronouncements on the proper course of the republic."

So popular among her students that she was dubbed "the Princess," Freeman served until 1888, when she fell in love with George Herbert Palmer, a widowed professor of philosophy at nearby Harvard.

Alice and George faced a dilemma. Both had demanding jobs, but he was unwilling to leave Harvard or to live close enough to Wellesley for Alice to commute. Alice decided to step down from her office while continuing to guide Wellesley as a trustee. "The College life is over!" she wrote her fiancé. "And I feel like an empty-handed, lonely creature. But I have you dearest! I say it over and over to quiet my heart."

Alice Freeman Palmer continued as the nation's leading spokesperson and consultant on women's education, however, bravely fighting recurring bouts of tuberculosis to advise and speak at all of the nation's top campuses.

When William Rainey Harper was looking for key aides to help launch the University of Chicago in 1892, he turned immediately to both Palmers. George refused to join Alice in what would have been the first big-time spousal package deal in higher education, but Alice accepted the post of dean of women provided she could remain based in Cambridge and commute to Chicago.

Alice Palmer's duties at Chicago ranged beyond women's issues; she helped choose male faculty members and shape faculty and student policies as well.

When Alice Palmer decided to end her tiring job at Chicago in 1895, the University of Michigan offered both Palmers chairs, but they declined. Alice resumed a lecture career which saw her speak often to women students on "The New Education" and "Why Should Girls Go To College."

Never free from health problems, she sailed with her husband for a recuperative trip to Europe in 1902. In Paris, an abdominal pain turned out to have been caused by an intestinal fold treatable only by surgery. The surgery went well, but a subsequent infection, common in those pre-antibiotic days, killed her within a week. She was only 47 years old.