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In
celebration of Women's History Month, Barnard introduces an
occasional article based on materials from the College Archives...
FROM
THE COLLEGE ARCHIVES …
Author Patricia Highsmith and Other Notable Women Through
Barnard History
Staff
of the Barnard Quarterly, with editor Patricia Highsmith
'42 seated at center, ca. 1942. From The Mortarboard
1943, p. 94. Credit: Barnard College Archives |
In
the 1942 edition of Barnard's Mortarboard yearbook
and set among the pages of class leaders, is a photo of a
young woman with straight brown hair, serious glasses and
a determined look. The caption reads: "Pat the distinctive,
Pat the gal who reads standing up. All Barnard thrills to
the tune of her smoothly written masterpieces." "Pat"
Highsmith would later become the celebrated writer of thrillers
like Strangers on a Train and The Talented Mr. Ripley,
both made into movies. As a Barnard student, Highsmith was
editor of "Quarterly," then the College literary
magazine, and wrote stories and columns, confessing on the
same yearbook page how glad she was that "Barnard made
me less ivory-towerish."
Less than ten years after she graduated, Patricia Highsmith
sold her first novel, Strangers on a Train, and an
aspiring movie director named Alfred Hitchcock turned it into
a thriller. That same year one of her short stories, "Where
to, Madam?" was published in the Woman's Home Companion
and dramatized by ABC radio's "Newsstand Theatre."
Patricia Highsmith's astounding career as "Queen of the
Crime Novel" had officially begun.
Highsmith's work spanned the next four decades, included dozens
of short stories, anthologies, and novels, earning her numerous
international awards as well as a place in literary history
that still draws new audiences. (Most recently, her book
The Talented Mr. Ripley was turned into a popular film
starring Matt Damon and Gywneth Paltrow.) Joan Dupont, '55,
another Barnard writer who frequently interviewed the author,
once noted that throughout her career, Highsmith combined
her two favorite occupations, writing and travelling, to create
some of the most sensational and chilling stories in the genre.
Eventually, Highsmith—who was born in Texas and raised
in Greenwich Village—made Europe her permanent home while
earning her the reputation, according to Contemporary Literary
Criticism in 1975, as the "crime writer who comes
the closest to giving crime writing a good name." She
died in 1995 at her home in Switzerland.
Highsmith's early works—and yearbook shots—can be
found in the Barnard College Archives
on the ground level of Wollman Library, just one part of a
fascinating tribute to the many women who have shaped Barnard's
history and consequently, the world they entered after college.
Since its inception in 1963, the Archives have grown into
an impressive repository of special collections, administrative/departmental
records, papers, scrapbooks and correspondence, as well as
visual materials that include thousands of photographs, lantern
slides, motion picture film, maps, architectural drawings
and prints. An audiotape collection also includes numerous
speeches, lectures and radio programs from the 1940's to today.
As a result, hundreds of people-from reporters, alumnae family
members, and documentarians to doctoral candidates, writers,
biographers, professors and students-have browsed Barnard's
past in the Archives. And like the protagonists in Highsmith's
novels, they visit the collections in search of clues, hoping
to find any information that will help them piece together
the mysteries of some of women's history's most significant
pioneers.
The Highsmith file, for instance, was particularly important
for Erk Grimm, associate professor of German and department
chair, who uses Highsmith's work in his course, "From
Text to Screen: German Literature and Film." When he
began researching the author's life, he discovered that many
web-sites offer little information about her education, and
if they do, it's usually wrong. (One said she was an NYU graduate.)
So Grimm found it helpful to discover the 'other' Patricia
Highsmith in the Barnard Archives.
"I was delighted to find some marvelous records about
a young and astonishing editor called Pat who also contributed
some pretty interesting short stories to the Barnard journal
about romance and cinema," Grimm says. "I think
for my students this was exciting news; we talked a lot about
Highsmith's education and career as well as her different
approach to the hard-boiled detective novel."
But Highsmith, of course, is not the only writer to emerge
from Barnard. Between 1963 and 2003, Barnard counts over 1,300
published authors among its alumnae, including Hortense Calisher
'32, June Jordan '57, Mary Gordon '71, the Millicent McIntosh
Professor of English, and Ntozake Shange '70. Eight have won
or shared the Pulitzer Prize: Judith Miller '68, Eileen McNamara
'74, Anna Quindlen '74, Suzanne Bilello '77, Natalie Angier
'78, Rose Marie Arce '86, Katherine Boo '88 and Jhumpa Lahiri
'89. And each has her own file in the Archives. (A complete
bibliography of alumnae authors can be found at www.barnard.edu/writers/alum_bib.html.)
"For every prominent Barnard alumna, however, there are
at least a dozen who are equally important but somewhat obscure
for whatever reason," says archivist Donald Glassman,
who suggests the combination of documents, records, letters,
artifacts and College publications in the Archives reveals
the greatness and diversity of Barnard's history.
Consider, for example, Gulli Lindh, class of '17, who was
the first woman to be accepted to Columbia's medical school.
Or Betty Fible Martin, '29, who was in one of the first classes
to enter Columbia's Law School but eventually returned to
Fairfax County, VA, to raise chickens. Or Anna Diggs Taylor,
'54, who became a United States District Judge in the Federal
Court in Detroit, Michigan. Or the countless women who participated
in the women's suffrage movement, or the female athletes who
paved the way for advancements in women sports, or the distinguished
professionals whose contributions-and sometimes just their
presence as women-in business, politics, science, medicine,
media, education, public affairs, etc., changed their respective
fields. Each story contributes to the larger story of the
College's heritage and the subsequent progress of western
culture.
While researching her forthcoming book (not yet titled) but
sub-titled, "How Columbia Women Have Changed the Way
We Think About Sex and Politics, " Rosalind Rosenberg,
Ann Whitney Olin Professor of History, discovered just how
extensive and far reaching that story is. She has spent countless
hours in the Archives, and followed an array of clues about
the lives of several women.
"Because of Barnard's prominence in Columbia's history,
the Columbia women who did the most changing were usually
Barnard women," Rosenberg says. Prompted to delve into
the history of women at Columbia because of the 250th anniversary
of the University, Rosenberg says she has been rewarded, "by
a truly fabulous cast of characters. Some are famous: Margaret
Mead and Zora Neale Hurston come to mind. Two of my favorite
forgotten heroines are the wives of the two presidents who
did the most to open educational opportunities to women at
Columbia in the late 19th century: Margaret Barnard, who nagged
her husband to admit women to the college, and Annie Curtis
Low, who nagged her husband to admit women to the graduate
faculties. Before I started my research, I had never heard
of either of them."
But Rosenberg was also surprised by another discovery she
made as she dug through the Archives. "The discovery
that Barnard has sent more women on to advanced degrees than
any other school of its size, and that Barnard women have
embarked on a greater variety of careers than have women in
the country at large really did surprise me," she says.
"This is a special place."
—Jo Kadlecek
For more information on the College Archives, please contact
Donald Glassman, dglassman@barnard.edu
or 212-854-4079
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