East to the Dawn (26 page)

In spite of her precipitous withdrawal and missed classes, she received a B in physics, which may be taken as an indication of unusual industry and talent. (Later she could joke about her brief stint, noting that when she couldn't think of the answer to the weekly physics quiz, “I inserted a little French poetry.”) But she almost failed the intermediate algebra course—“planned especially for students who have had a course in elementary algebra to quadratics”—which would certainly have challenged her even if she hadn't missed so many classes, since she hadn't had a math course since high school. She received a C—which meant, in addition to not receiving credit, that her standing as a matriculated student was in jeopardy, for her acceptance as a degree candidate had been granted “conditional on Intermediate Algebra.”

If ever she needed money, it was then. If ever her independence was threatened, it was then. The Stabler family, comfortably well off with their big house and servants, could have helped her if she had asked. She didn't ask. She was too tough and too proud. Instead, she drove to Boston and settled into the small, neat, decidedly modest two-story wood-frame house at 76 Brooks Street in West Medford, where Amy and Muriel lived.

Grimly determined to erase the blot on her academic record, she enrolled at Harvard summer school—but only for one course, Math
S-1, a trigonometry course that assumed a grounding in algebra “through Quadratics and Plane Geometry.” It was exactly the material she had covered so badly at Columbia. Yet if she wanted to pursue her goal of a degree in engineering, she had to remove the blot and pass with flying colors. With nothing to distract her, she performed with her usual thoroughness, earning three credits and an A.

Taking just the one course left Amelia with plenty of time to learn about her new academic institution. Harvard summer school would have been a tantalizing experience for her. Assiduous tracker of achieving women that she still was, she must have taken comfort in the fact that for the first time there was a woman on a Harvard faculty, Dr. Alice Hamilton, assistant professor of industrial medicine, the pioneer investigator of industrial pollution in the United States, author of the just-published
Industrial Poisons in the United States,
which would shortly prompt the surgeon general to initiate a study of the dangers in tetraethyl lead.

But the inclusion of Alice Hamilton on the Harvard faculty in those years was an anomaly. Nowhere at that time was there an institution that gave out a more conflicting set of messages for the aspiring female than Harvard. In winter Harvard was exclusively a male domain. Only during the six-week summer school were women permitted to enroll, although even then they were excluded from courses in architecture, engineering, and geology. They were welcomed in the library (in the summer), but not in the recreation areas, or the dormitories. In the winter women went to Radcliffe, where Harvard professors taught them in special classes. During this time the libraries were restricted to men. And not even Professor Hamilton was immune to slights—she was barred from marching in commencement exercises, barred from the Harvard Club, and not permitted to claim the usual professorial quota of football tickets. For Amelia, the conditional status of females would have ruled out Radcliffe.

And so, in pursuit of a scientific career, Amelia applied to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for the fall term. MIT, in contrast to its rival institution up the Charles, accepted women as well as men without reservation. What made it especially attractive to Amelia was that it was in the process of forming a department of aeronautical engineering.

But being short of funds, she needed a scholarship to go, and in spite of her Columbia and Harvard credits, she was turned down. It put an end to her dream of earning an engineering degree in the Boston area—and because her mother's funds were so slender, and because living with her mother and sister in West Medford, where Muriel was teaching in a junior high school, was rent free, Boston, however depressing, was Amelia's only choice.

In later years she would claim that she had never tried to get a degree in engineering, categorically stating, “During my collegiate experience I never sought a degree.” Failure was not allowed to intrude upon the seamless past Amelia presented to the world.

It was truly a terrible time. Amelia was twenty-eight and farther from a career than she had been at twenty-one. None of her plans had jelled. What was worse, she had nothing to build on. Her state of mind that fall was desperate; she was on the verge of despair, as she admitted to Marian Stabler. “Thanks for your as usual delightful letter(s). I am ashamed I have tried to write but every time I didn't finish.... No, I did not get into M.I.T. as planned, owing to financial difficulties. No, I can not come to New York, much, ah much as I should like owing to when I leave Boston I think I'll never come back.”

She, who had always effortlessly helped her friends, who was the rock everyone leaned on, now had to admit that she was useless. She couldn't even promote Marian's woodcuts for Christmas cards, she admitted to Marian. “Do you want your samples back? I haven't decided yet and may not be able to send anybody anything. Isn't that sad?”

She couldn't get out of the habit of giving advice, however, admonishing Marian to read Sherwood Anderson's
Winesburg, Ohio.
But even her choice of this book indicated a negative frame of mind. For if Anderson's brilliantly realistic writing managed to capture the atmosphere of middle America and lay bare the midwestern soul, what he uncovered was a very bleak landscape indeed. He wrote of the shy, the lonely, the defeated, the dreamers: a boy who never grew up, a doctor who dared not practice, an artist who gave up painting, a mother who drove away her son, a young woman resigning herself to spinsterhood, a man who finds himself robbed even of his dreams.

There was one remotely positive note: never one to be idle, Amelia had begun teaching, she confided to Marian. “I am tutoring blind guys in Trig. Did I tell you before?”

The problems of the unassimilated immigrant, particularly the non-English-speaking immigrant, were very much on the minds of Boston's educators and politicians. Massachusetts had begun a crash program to teach English to foreign-born adults working throughout the state, setting up for the purpose a program in the University Extension Department of the State Board of Education. Harvard summer school offered classes specifically tailored to this specialized need, a program that almost immediately was broadened to include classes in citizenship, classes
for the blind, and classes in English for the children of the foreign-born.

When Amelia began teaching, 27,759 foreigners were enrolled in the state program in 104 cities and towns throughout the state, 2,987 of whom were blind. The evening classes were usually held in the schools, while day classes were held in homes or in factories during lunch hour and after work. An average class met three times a week for twenty weeks. She would have been teaching in Lynn, Lawrence, Quincy, Salem, and even farther afield, driving to outlying immigrant enclaves in her Kissell. But the pay was low, most of the classes met in the evening, and the traveling allowance was minuscule. She decided to take a break and try and do it on her own.

By now it was spring. Building on her experience, Amelia persuaded the Biddle and Smart Company in Amesbury, Massachusetts, which employed a great many foreigners, of the wisdom and the practical advantage of letting her run “an office class in the Miller Course of Correct English.” The course ran for fifteen weeks, from March 16 through June 22. Although Biddle and Smart were pleased with her (“She has a pleasant and pleasing personality and handled her work and the class well”), before many weeks were out she quit. She didn't find teaching English to foreigners challenging or stimulating.

Lucy Challiss passed through Boston one Saturday that June. Lucy lunched with a friend and shopped; she was readying herself for the European cruise she was about to take. She had no idea that Amelia and Amy were in Boston. So deep had the Earharts sunk, they had lost touch even with their dearest relatives; as far as the Challisses were concerned, they might just as well have dropped off the edge of the earth.

That month Amelia began working at Bournewood Hospital as a nurse-companion, signing on to work until October 1.

Bournewood, a private hospital for the treatment of mental diseases, located on an estate in Brookline, had been founded in 1884 by Dr. Henry R. Stedman, one of the first doctors to devote himself to the new discipline of psychiatry. It was a gracious place, run on the theory that its wealthy patients would get well faster if they were in a homelike setting and were cared for by “companion nurses,” accomplished and well educated, who would form close personal bonds with their charges. “Personal attention and influence suitably directed is the sine qua non” was the operating philosophy.

It was an odd choice of occupation for Amelia, considering that she had left her medical studies because the idea of ministering to hypochondriacs, of prescribing “sugar pellets to a patient with an imaginary illness,”
had “floored” her. But working at Bournewood gave her another perspective: It made her more tolerant. “I did not see then that there was just as much of a problem in curing the somewhat mentally ill as those physically so—even though the methods used might differ.” But if it was educational for Amelia, she was much too ambitious for it to be satisfying. Companion nurses were not doctors; they could not control methods of treatment or prescribe medication. Nor was there any chance of advancement, any chance to grow, for to become a psychiatrist meant not just getting a degree in medicine but undergoing psychiatric training—eight long expensive years. For an impecunious woman of twenty-nine, the gulf was unbridgeable.

However attractive the job had first sounded, the reality was that most of the work was menial and much of it distasteful. She lasted only several months before deciding to leave. “Work too confining and pay small,” she would later write, but it was the former reason that was of primary importance; her salary was seventy dollars a month—her next job would pay less. She carefully let none of the impatience she felt over her limited role show, and as a result the hospital was sorry to lose her. “She leaves to increase her salary,” wrote Dr. Torney, who ran Bournewood. It was the end of summer.

There was in Boston a unique, thriving vocational guidance and referral center staffed exclusively by women called the Women's Educational and Industrial Union (WEIU). The first such center for women in the nation, it had been founded by an Englishwoman, Harriet Clisby, “to increase fellowship among women and to promote the best practical methods for securing their educational, industrial and social advancement.” It did everything from providing free legal advice to poor workers, to calling attention to the rights of women and children, to running a school of housekeeping, to opening a school for salesmanship for women to train them “to be as competent in purchasing accounting and general salesmanship” as men. Just a few years before, it had set as a condition for the Massachusetts Legal Aid Society to take over the work of its Protective Committee the stipulation that they hire a female lawyer. To Amelia, still gamely pasting clips about female doers in her scrapbook, the way the WEIU had forced the Massachusetts Legal Aid Society to hire a female lawyer would have been a riveting achievement.