The Power and Passion of M. Carey Thomas

Suffragist, lesbian feminist and pioneer advocate of women's career and educational rights, Martha Carey Thomas (1857-1935) was president of Bryn Mawr College and one of the founders of Johns Hopkins Medical School. According to this wholly engrossing and often shocking biography, she was also a plagiarist, an elitist snob, a racist who actively discriminated against Jewish and African American applicants to Bryn Mawr and a deceitful, autocratic administrator. Horowitz ( Campus Life ), a Smith history professor, presents compelling evidence that Thomas's lover, Mamie Gwinn, ghostwrote all or part of Thomas's Ph.D. dissertation, and further, that Gwinn was the unacknowledged collaborator of Thomas's Bryn Mawr lectures. With sympathetic insight, Horowitz probes how Thomas replaced the Christian faith of her orthodox Quaker parents with a positivist belief in evolutionary science. Horowitz also unravels Thomas's partly simultaneous, passionate affairs with bohemian Gwinn and wealthy Mary Garrett, a balancing act complicated by Gwinn's love for novelist Alfred Hodder. This is a brilliant portrait of a complex, divided personality. Photos. (Sept.)