Perkins’s parents saw to it that she was educated, but she never earned good grades. She had a natural facility with words, and in high school she used her glibness to slide by. She then went off to Mount Holyoke College, a member of the class of 1902. The rules at the college, and at colleges generally, were, again, very different from the rules today. Today, students live more or less unsupervised in their dorms. They are given the freedom to conduct their private lives as they see fit. Then, they were placed under restrictions, many of which seem absurd now, that were designed to inculcate deference, modesty, and respect. Here are some of the rules that formed part of the deference code when Perkins entered Holyoke: “Freshmen should keep a respectful silence in the presence of sophomores. Freshmen meeting a sophomore on the campus should bow respectfully. No Freshman shall wear a long skirt or hair high on head before the mid-year examinations.”20 Perkins survived the restraint, and the hazing that went along with this class structure, and became one of the social stars of her class, elected class president her senior year.
Today, teachers tend to look for their students’ intellectual strengths, so they can cultivate them. But a century ago, professors tended to look for their students’ moral weaknesses, so they could correct them. A Latin teacher, Esther Van Dieman, diagnosed Perkins’s laziness, her tendency to be too easy on herself. Van Dieman used Latin grammar the way a drill instructor might use forced marches, as an ordeal to cultivate industriousness. She forced Perkins to work, hour upon hour, on precise recitations of the Latin verb tenses. Perkins would burst into tears in frustration and boredom, but later expressed appreciation for the enforced discipline: “For the first time I became conscious of character.”21
Perkins was interested in history and literature, and she floundered badly in chemistry. Nonetheless, her chemistry teacher, Nellie Goldthwaite, hounded her into majoring in chemistry. The idea was that if she was tough enough to major in her weakest subject, she’d be tough enough to handle whatever life threw at her. Goldthwaite urged Perkins to take the hardest courses even if it meant earning mediocre grades. Perkins took the challenge. Goldthwaite became her faculty adviser. Years later, Perkins told a student with the school’s alumnae quarterly, “The undergraduate mind should concentrate on the scientific courses, which temper the human spirit, harden and refine it, and make of it a tool with which one may tackle any kind of material.”22
Mount Holyoke was the sort of school that leaves a permanent mark on its students. It did not see its role, as modern universities tend to, in purely Adam I cognitive terms. It was not there merely to teach people how to think. It was not there merely to help students question their assumptions. Instead, it successfully performed the broader role of college: helping teenagers become adults. It inculcated self-control. It helped its students discover new things to love. It took young women and ignited their moral passions by giving them a sense that humans are caught in a web of good and evil and that life is an epic struggle between these large forces. A dozen voices from across the institution told students that while those who lead flat and unremarkable lives may avoid struggle, a well-lived life involves throwing oneself into struggle, that large parts of the most worthy lives are spent upon the rack, testing moral courage and facing opposition and ridicule, and that those who pursue struggle end up being happier than those who pursue pleasure.
Then it told them that the heroes in this struggle are not the self-aggrandizing souls who chase after glory; they are rather the heroes of renunciation, those who accept some arduous calling. Then it tried to cut down their idealism and make it permanent by criticizing mere flights of compassion and self-congratulatory sacrifice. It emphasized that performing service is not something you do out of the goodness of your heart but as a debt you are repaying for the gift of life.
Then it gave them concrete ways to live this life of steady, heroic service. Over the decades, Mount Holyoke sent hundreds of women to missionary and service jobs in northwest Iran, Natal in southern Africa, and Maharashtra in western India. “Do what nobody else wants to do; go where nobody else wants to go,” the school’s founder, Mary Lyon, implored her students.
In 1901 a new president arrived, Mary Woolley, one of the first women to graduate from Brown and a biblical studies scholar. She wrote an essay titled “Values of College Training for Women” for Harper’s Bazaar that captures the tone of high moral ambition that characterized life at the school. “Character is the main object for education,” she declared, continuing, “A true perspective implies poise.” Today, the word “poise” suggests social grace. But in that day it referred to the deeper qualities of steadiness and balance. “The lack of these qualities is often the weak place in the armor, and good impulses, high purposes, real ability, fail of their end.”23
The Mount Holyoke education was dominated by theology and the classics—Jerusalem and Athens. The students were to take from religion an ethic of care and compassion, and from the ancient Greeks and Romans a certain style of heroism—to be courageous and unflinching in the face of the worst the world could throw at you. In her Harper’s Bazaar essay, Woolley quoted the Stoic philosopher Epictetus: “To live in the presence of great truths and eternal laws, to be led by permanent ideals, that is what keeps a man patient when the world ignores him and calm and unspoiled when the world praises him.” Perkins and Woolley would remain friends until Woolley’s death.
Perkins also went to college at a time when the social gospel movement was at its most influential. In response to urbanization and industrialization, the leaders of the movement, including Walter Rauschenbusch, rejected the individualistic and privatized religion that was prevalent in many genteel churches. It is not enough, Rauschenbusch argued, to heal the sinfulness in each individual human heart. There is also suprapersonal sin—evil institutions and social structures that breed oppression and suffering. The leaders of the social gospel movement challenged their listeners to test and purify themselves by working for social reform. The real Christian life, they said, is not a solitary life of prayer and repentance. It is a life of sacrificial service, which involves practical solidarity with the poor and membership in a larger movement working to repair God’s kingdom on earth.
As class president, Perkins helped select her class motto, “Be ye steadfast.” The full verse, which Perkins read to her classmates in their final prayer meeting, is from 1 Corinthians. “Therefore my beloved brethren, be ye steadfast, unmovable, always abounding in the work of the Lord, forasmuch as ye know that your labor is not in vain in the Lord.”
Holyoke took Perkins, who had been taught, because of her sex and because of her stature, to think lowly of herself, and it persuaded her and the other women that she could do something heroic. But it achieved this task in an ironic way. It didn’t tell her that she was awesome and qualified for heroism. It forced her to confront her natural weaknesses. It pushed her down. It pushed her down and then taught her to push herself upward and outward. Perkins came to Holyoke sweet and glib, diminutive and charming. She left stronger, fortified, ardent for service and clearly unsuited to the narrow bourgeois world in which she’d grown up. When Frances Perkins’s mother came to see her daughter graduate from Mount Holyoke, she remarked in a tone of dismay, “I don’t recognize my daughter Fanny anymore. I can’t understand it. She’s a stranger to me.”24