first to receive it in the
sciences. Because of her extensive training in Europe, she was unusually
well-versed in German and French scientific literature, which she introduced to America's
fledgling field of botany through more than three dozen published papers. An active
member of the Torrey Botanical Club from 1888-1897, , Gregory served as editor of its Bulletin,
and in 1895 she published Elements of Plant Anatomy, the first book in America on
the topic.
For several years after earning her
doctorate, Gregory held temporary positions at Smith College, Bryn Mawr, and
Radcliffe. She then accepted the first post-doctoral fellowship ever awarded to a
woman at the University of Pennsylvania. In 1890, when the New York City Torrey
Botanical Club offered to equip a botany laboratory at the newly opened and financially
strapped Barnard College, Gregory offered her services without salary to set it up.
The Barnard trustees readily accepted the botanical club's gift and wanted to accept
Gregory's offer. Botany was then a very popular subject among young women; indeed,
in 1890, forty percent of the members of the New York City Torrey Botanical Club were
women, many of them well-to-do, who loved the field trips, socializing, and collecting
that an interest in botany afforded. For women who were less well off, botany
offered employment possibilities, especially at the rapidly growing U. S. Department of
Agriculture, which was facing a labor shortage and was therefore willing to hire women as
"assistants" in botany.
But there was a problem. When
the Columbia Board of Trustees approved the founding of Barnard College in 1889, it
insisted that Barnard hire only Columbia instructors or professors to teach its
students. For Barnard to employ Emily Gregory, with or without salary, would
require a change in the new college's by-laws. After considering this matter, along
with the embarrassing fact that Barnard was already beginning to need more new faculty
than Columbia was in a position to supply, Columbia President Seth Low proposed the
following change in Barnard's by-laws: henceforth, all Barnard faculty "shall consist
of Professors and Instructors to be approved by the President of Columbia
College." As before, only Columbia faculty would be empowered to give
examinations, but faculty hired by Barnard and approved by the Columbia President could
teach, if no one from Columbia was available. On May 5, 1890 the Columbia
Trustees approved, the Barnard Board quickly concurred, and President Low approved the
appointment of Emily Gregory as Lecturer on the Anatomy and Physiology of Plants in
Barnard College.
Within a year Gregory was earning a
regular salary and developing a program in botany at Barnard. She taught all the
students and supervised the laboratory. She fought the administration's plan to put
the new chemistry lab in the space reserved for botany. She developed a series of
four courses in botany at a time when Columbia offered nothing comparable. In fact,
Gregory's botany curriculum went so far beyond what Columbia was then offering its
undergraduates that Columbia officials began to balk at crediting all her courses toward
the degree, since exact Columbia counterparts did not exist. Barnard's Dean Emily
Smith patiently appealed to President Low, noting that in every case the courses in
question had been approved by him before they were offered. In the meantime, the
head of the Columbia Department of Botany had simply ceded Gregory the right to give all
Barnard examinations in botany, university policy to the contrary notwithstanding.
On top of her undergraduate instruction, Gregory added graduate students, the so-called
"science specials" who, because they were women, could do graduate work nowhere
else in the city.
By the spring of 1894, Gregory was
feeling overwhelmed by her own success, and on May 24 she sent President Low a long,
hand-written protest against her position at Barnard. In addition to the extent of
the work and the paltriness of her salary, she was bothered by the fact that the title
page of her new textbook would identify her simply as "Lecturer in
Botany." This was a title, she noted, that implied "anything but my real
function."
Low was torn. He fully
recognized the justice of Gregory's protest; she deserved the title of professor.
But as he wrote Dean Emily Smith on January 17, 1895, "I cannot consent to anything
which will relieve our own professors of responsibility for the educational work of
Barnard College." Low firmly believed that if he allowed the college to make
its own professorial appointments, the pressure he could exert on the Columbia faculty to
fulfill their obligations to teach at Barnard would be greatly lessened.
Despite these reservations, Low was willing to make an exception in this one case.
He approved Gregory's promotion to Professor of Botany at Barnard. No one seems to
have raised the possibility that Gregory be appointed Professor of Botany at
Columbia. In fact, Columbia did not make its first female professorial appointment
until 1929, when the chemistry department hired Mary Caldwell, a biochemist and
nutritionist, to the rank of assistant professor.
Emily Gregory held the rank of
professor for only two years. In 1897, at the age of 56, she died after a brief
illness. In her Annual Report, Dean Smith called attention to the
institutional as well as the personal void left by Gregory's death. "The fact that
our instruction is given by officers of Columbia," she noted, "though it is one
of our chief advantages, deprives our students of the object-lesson afforded by women of
first-rate mental capacity and training, devoting their lives without arriere-pensee to
the work for which they are apt." Gregory's death, together with the
reluctance of the Columbia faculty to hire women, contributed to Smith's growing
conviction that Barnard needed its own faculty.
Largely through Smith's efforts,
Barnard and Columbia entered into an Intercorporate Agreement in 1900, whereby
Columbia granted Barnard the right to make its own appointments and develop its own
curriculum. Columbia retained an ultimate veto over appointments, inasmuch as it
would continue to grant its degree to Barnard graduates, but the initial decision was to
be made by the Dean of Barnard College and the Barnard Board of Trustees, and the
agreement provided specifically that "Members of the Barnard Faculty may be either
men or women." Barnard College was the only woman's college affiliated with a
research university to win the right to hire its own faculty. One fifth of those
hired in 1900 were women, and by the middle of the twentieth century half were.
As Barnard's first female professor,
Emily Gregory set an important example of a first-rate woman devoting her life to academic
work and thereby expanding the possible futures a young woman might consider.
In recognition of the importance Professor Gregory attached to cultivating young
minds, Barnard students annually bestow the Emily Gregory Award for Excellence in
Teaching on a member of the faculty.
[Rudolf Schmid and Dennis William Stevenson,
"'Botanical Text Books,' an unpublished manuscript (1897) by Emily Lovira Gregory
(1841-1897) on plant anatomy textbooks," Bulletin of the Torrey Botanical Club, 144
(1987): 307-318; Marian Churchill White, A History of Barnard College (New York:
Columbia, 1954), 23, 29-30, 64, 193; Margaret Rossiter, Women Scientists in America:
Struggles and Strategies to 1940 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1982), 59-63, 84-86;
Columbia Trustee Minutes, March 3 - May 5, 1890, Columbiana, Columbia University; Seth Low
to Emily Smith, January 17, 1895, Emily James Putnam Correspondence, Columbiana.]
ROSALIND ROSENBERG |
