The women who constitute the Wellesley College Alumnae Association, numbered in 1914-1915 five thousand and thirty-five. The members are all those who have received the Baccalaureate degree from Wellesley, and all those who have received the Master's degree and have applied for membership. But only dues-paying members receive notices of meetings and have the right to vote. Non-graduates who pay the annual dues receive the Alumnae Register, and the notices and publications of the alumnae, but do not vote.
Authoritative statistics concerning the occupations of Wellesley women are not available. About forty per cent of the alumnae are married. The exact proportion of teachers is not known, but it is of course large. The Wellesley College Christian Association is of great assistance to the alumnae recorder in keeping in touch with Wellesley missionaries, but even the Christian Association disclaims infallibility in questions of numbers. An article in the News for February, 1912, by Professor Kendrick, the head of the Department of Bible Study, states that no record is kept of missionaries at work in our own country, but there were then missionaries from Wellesley in Mexico and Brazil, as well as those who were doing city missionary work in the United States. The missionary record for 1915 would seem to indicate that there were then about one hundred Wellesley women at mission stations in foreign countries, including Japan, China, Korea, India, Ceylon, Persia, Turkey, Africa, Europe, Mexico, South America, Alaska, and the Philippines.
From time to time, the alumnae section of the News publishes an article on the occupations and professions of Wellesley graduates, with incomplete lists of the names of those who are engaged in Law, Medicine, Social Work, Journalism, Teaching, Business, and all the other departments of life into which women are penetrating; and from this all too meager material, the historian is able to glean a few general facts, but no trustworthy statistics.
In 1914, the list of Wellesley women, most of whom were alumnae, at the head of private schools, included the principals of the National Cathedral School at Washington, D.C.; of Abbot Academy, Andover, Walnut Hill School, Natick, Dana Hall, the Weston School, the Longwood School, all in Massachusetts, and two preparatory schools in Boston; Buffalo Seminary; Kent Place School, and a coeducational school, both in Summit, New Jersey; Hosmer Hall, in St. Louis; Ingleside School, Taconic School and the Catherine Aiken School, in Connecticut; Science Hill, at Shelbyville, Kentucky;Ferry Hall, at Lake Forest, Illinois; the El Paso School for Girls; the Lincoln School, in Providence, Rhode Island; Wyoming Seminary, another coeducational school; as well as schools for American girls in Germany, France, and Italy. This does not take into account the many Wellesley graduates holding positions of importance in colleges, in high schools, and in the grammar and primary schools throughout the country.
The tentative list of Wellesley women holding positions of importance in social work, in 1914, is equally impressive. The head workers at Denison House,--the Boston College Settlement,--at the Baltimore Settlement, at Friendly House, Brooklyn, and Hartley House, New York, are all graduates of Wellesley. Probation officers, settlement residents, Associated Charity workers, Consumers' League secretaries, promoters of Social Welfare Work, leaders of Working Girls' Clubs, members of Trade-union Leagues and the Suffrage League, show many Wellesley names among their numbers. A Wellesley woman is working at the Hindman School in Kentucky, among the poor whites; another is General Superintendent of the Massachusetts Commission for the Blind; another is Associate Field Secretary of the New York Charity Organization Department of the Russell Sage Foundation; another is Head Investigator for the Massachusetts Babies' Hospital.
The Superintendent of the State Reformatory for Girls at Lancaster, Massachusetts, is a Wellesley graduate who is doing work of unusual distinction in this field. Mary K. Conyngton, Wellesley, '94, took part in the Federal investigation into the condition of woman and child wage earners, ordered by Congress in 1907, and has made a study of the relations between the occupations, and the criminality, of women. Her book "How to Help", published by The Macmillan Company, embodies the results of her experience in organized charities, investigations for improved housing, and other industrial and municipal reforms. In 1909, Miss Conyngton received a permanent appointment in the Bureau of Labor at Washington, D.C.
Wellesley has her lawyers and doctors, her architects, her journalists, her scholars; every year their tribes increase.
Among her many journalists are Caroline Maddocks, 1892, and Agnes Edwards Rothery, 1909.
Of her poets, novelists, short story writers, and essayists, the names of Katharine Lee Bates, Estelle M. Hurll, Abbie Carter Goodloe, Margarita Spalding Gerry, Florence Wilkinson Evans, Florence Converse, Martha Hale Shackford, Annie Kimball Tuell, Jeannette Marks, are familiar to the readers of the Atlantic, the Century, Scribner's and other magazines; and the more technical publications of Gertrude Schopperle, Laura A. Hibbard, Eleanor A. McC. Gamble, Lucy J. Freeman, Eloise Robinson, and Flora Isabel McKinnon, have won the suffrages of scholars.
Her most noted woman of letters is Katharine Lee Bates, Wellesley, '80, the beloved head of the Department of English Literature.
Miss Bates's beautiful hymn, "America", has achieved the distinction of a national reputation; it has been adopted as one of America's own songs and is sung by school children all over our country.
