Religious, democratic, intellectually serious is our Wellesley girl, and last but not least, she is a lover of beauty. How could she fail to be? How many times, in early winter twilights, has she come over the stile into the Stone Hall meadow, and stood long moments, hushed, bespelled, by the tranquil pale loveliness of the lake, the dusky, rimming hills, the bare, slim blackness of twig and bough embroidering the silver sky,--the whole luminous etching? How often, mid-morning in spring, has she sat with her book in a green shade west of the library, and lifted her eyes to see above the daffodil-bank of Longfellow's fountain the blue lake waters laughing between the upspringing trunks of the tall oak trees? Wherever there are Wellesley women, when spring is waking,--in Switzerland, in Sicily, in Japan, in England,--they are remembering the Wellesley spring, that pageant of young green of lawns and hills and tenderest flushing rose in baby oak leaves and baby maples, that twinkling dance of birches and of poplars, that splendor of the youth of the year amid which young maidens shone and blossomed, starring the campus among the other spring flowers. And are there Wellesley women anywhere in the autumn who do not think of Wellesley and four autumns? Of the long russet vistas of the west woods? Of the army with banners, scarlet and golden, and bronze and russet and rose, that marched and trumpeted around Lake Waban's streaming Persian pattern of shadows? When you speak to a Wellesley girl of her Alma Mater, her eyes widen with the lover's look, and you know that she is seeing a vision of pure beauty.
II.
In 1876, the students, shocked and grieved by the discovery of one of those cases of cheating with which every college has to deal from time to time, met together, and made a very stringent rule to be enforced by themselves. This "law", enacted on February 18, 1876, marks the first step toward Student Government at Wellesley; it reads as follows:
"The students of Wellesley College unanimously decree as a perpetual law of the college that no student shall use a translation or key in the study of any lesson or in any review, recitation, or examination. Every student who may enter the college shall be in honor bound to expose every violation of this law. If any student shall be known to violate this law, she shall be warned by a committee of the students and publicly exposed. If the offense be repeated the students shall demand her immediate expulsion as unworthy to remain a member of Wellesley College."
It is signed by the presidents of the two classes, 1879 and 1880, then in college.
Until 1881, when the Courant, the first Wellesley periodical, gave the students opportunity to express their minds concerning matters of college policy, we have no definite record of further steps toward self-government on the part of the undergraduates. The disciplinary methods of those early years are amusingly described by Mary C. Wiggin, of the class of '85, who tells us that authority was vested in four bodies, the president, the doctor, the corridor teacher and the head of the Domestic Department.
"The president was responsible for our going out and our coming in. The 'office' might give permission to leave town, but all tardiness in returning must be explained to the president. How timidly four of us came to Miss Freeman in my sophomore year to explain that the freshman's mother had kept us to supper after our 'permitted' drive on Monday afternoon! What an occasion it gave her to caution us as to sophomore influence over freshmen!
"Very infrequent were our journeys to Boston in those days, theaters were forbidden. Once during my four years I saw Booth in 'Macbeth' during a Christmas vacation, salving my conscience with a liberal interpretation of the phrase, 'while connected with the college', trying to forget the parting injunction, 'Remember, girls, that You are Wellesley College.'...
"In the old days we were seated alphabetically in church and chapel, where attendance was kept in each 'section' by one of its members. A growing laxity permitted you to sit out of place on Sunday evenings, provided that you reported to your section girl. Otherwise you would be called to the office to explain your absence....
"Very slowly did the idea dawn upon me that there was a faculty back of all these very pleasant personal relations."
But in the late '80's, the advance toward student self-government begins to be traceable, slowly but surely. In the spring of 1887, on the initiative of the faculty, the first formal conference between representatives of faculty and students was called, to consider questions of class organization. Other conferences took place at irregular intervals during the next seven years, as occasion arose, and these often led to new legislation. The subjects discussed were, the Magazine, the Legenda, Athletics, the Junior Prom. In the autumn of 1888, students were first allowed to hand in excuses for absence from college classes; the responsibility for giving a "true, valid and signed excuse" resting with the individual student. In this same autumn the law forbidding eating between meals was repealed, but students were still not permitted to keep eatables in their rooms.
