Wellesley to serve as Columbia's
librarian, she met Columbia President F. A. P. Barnard, who was then trying to open
Columbia to women. Barnard urged Edgerton to apply to do graduate work and, when the
Columbia Trustees rebuffed her, suggested that she visit the trustees individually to
plead her case. Eventually she won the favor of all, including even the Reverend
Morgan Dix, who in addition to serving as a trustee was the rector of Trinity
Church.
Dix vigorously opposed opening
Columbia College to women, but he came to see that Winifred Edgerton was a special
case. She was not applying to the College but rather to the graduate school., and
her talent and seriousness of purpose were immediately apparent. She needed a
telescope (only Columbia had one in those days), and the professor of astronomy needed an
assistant. And since her family worshipped at Trinity Church, Dr. Dix was assured of
her good character. Believing that no precedent would be set, the trustees voted to
allow Miss Edgerton to pursue her studies.
Dix adamantly opposed women's taking
classes with men and seems to have assumed that Edgerton was pursuing her advanced studies
exclusively on a tutorial basis. In fact, she took several classes with male
students in the School of Mines, which at that time housed astronomy. For the most
part, however, she worked on her own, often staying in the observatory long past
midnight. For company she kept a chest full of dolls with which she played when no
one was around. Two years later, in 1886, she became the first woman ever to win a
Columbia Ph.D. In fact, she earned it cum laude, and at commencement the
Columbia students gave her an ovation that lasted fully two minutes.
Edgerton came close to accepting a
professorship at Smith College the following year, but at the last minute decided to marry
John Hamilton Merrill, a graduate of Columbia’s School of Mines ('85 E, '90
Ph.D.). The couple married at Trinity Church on September 1, 1887.
Marriage accomplished what no previous obstacle had – Winifred Edgerton's effective
erasure from scholarly life. Although she joined the campaign to found Barnard
College, serving with Annie Nathan Meyer on the committee of five that drafted proposals
for the school, she withdrew when her husband objected to the impropriety of committee
meetings being held in men’s offices downtown. When her husband secured a
position as state geologist, the couple moved to Albany, where Winifred was asked by the
Lieutenant Governor to serve on the local school board. Again, her husband forbade
her to do work that he deemed unladylike, and she acquiesced.
Winifred Edgerton Merrill bore four
children, taught school, and in 1906 founded the Oaksmere School for girls, which she ran
for twenty years. Her husband died in 1916. In 1926 she took a position
as the librarian at the Barbizon Hotel for women in New York, where she resided, until two
years before her death, at the age of 88. |
