Frederica de Laguna of Bryn Mawr College: Freddy's Beginnings at Bryn Mawr College

Frederica de Laguna of Bryn Mawr College

Richard S. Davis

Abstract. Most readers of Arctic Anthropology know a great deal about Frederica de Laguna’s contributions to the many branches of anthropology, but fewer know much about her life-long relationship with Bryn Mawr College. Bryn Mawr was, in turn, her home, school, college, edi-tor, employer, base of operations, source of dismay, source of pride, and much more. Certainly, Bryn Mawr was formative to Freddy’s scholarship and personal growth; the college continued as a major presence throughout her career as an internationally known anthropologist. It is impor-tant, therefore, to gain a picture of Freddy’s life at Bryn Mawr in order to gain a sense of her as a person and her formation as an anthropologist.

Freddy’s Beginnings at Bryn Mawr College

Bryn Mawr College was opened in 1885. It was lo-cated in a small suburban town about 12 miles west of Philadelphia and near the Main Line of the Pennsylvania Railroad. Bryn Mawr has always been a women’s college, and was unique from its beginning in offering women both graduate and undergraduate degrees in a wide range of aca-demic departments.

Freddy was one year old when she arrived at Bryn Mawr in 1907. Her father and mother, Theo-dore and Grace, had just joined the Bryn Mawr fac-ulty and both taught in the Department of Philos-ophy. They moved from Ann Arbor where Freddy was born. At the time Bryn Mawr College was just a little more than 20 years old, but its reputation for academic excellence was growing rapidly un-der the presidency of M. Carey Thomas. The cam-pus was transforming once open estate and farm land with the construction of distinctive dormi-tories, classroom buildings, and the library built

in the collegiate Gothic style designed by archi-tects Walter Cope and John Stewardson. The over-all campus plan had been laid out by Frederick Law Olmstead who is well known for designing Central Park in New York City. The de Laguna fam-ily moved into a faculty apartment in a Victorian era house called Yarrow East on the edge of cam-pus. Freddy would live on campus or use it for her permanent address for the next seventy years. The family made only one move to a larger faculty apartment on “Faculty Row” in 1923. It had a great view of the verdant athletic fi elds and the spires and towers of the campus buildings in the distance (Fig. 1). Freddy recalled that from the start she was completely surrounded by the campus, faculty, and faculty children. “All through my life I never imagined any career or setting other than the aca-demic” (McClellan 1985:37).

Freddy’s father taught her lessons (home schooled as we might say today) until she entered the Phoebe Anna Thorne School in the fall of 1915 at the age of 9. She had little to say about the school in her extensive interview with Catharine

Richard S. Davis, Department of AnthropologyBryn Mawr College, Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania 19010

ARCTIC ANTHROPOLOGY, Vol. 43, No. 2, pp. 21–27, 2006 ISSN 0066-6939; E-ISSN 1933-8139© 2006 by the Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System

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22 Arctic Anthropology 43:2

McClellan in 1985 other than that she never was taught handwriting properly and for the rest of her life never felt it was very legible. She did teach herself to “draw” letters some years later and felt that this worked well for her fi eld notes. There were four girls in her senior class and Freddy was the only one bound for college. The other three were daughters of affl uent Philadelphia Main Line families. Freddy remarked that she felt very sorry for one of the girls whose family fortune was lost in the crash of 1929.

A bit of background on Freddy’s schooling is instructive. In 1913 Bryn Mawr College opened the Phoebe Anna Thorne Model School on its campus. The school was run by the Graduate Department of Education and accepted girls from the primary to the college preparatory level. It was heavily in-fl uenced by the then-popular progressive ideas of philosopher John Dewey. According to Dewey, ed-ucators were to provide students with experiences that are immediately valuable and which better en-able them to contribute to society. Dewey had a

holistic conception of the “functional, organic re-lationships between men and their environment” and wished to bring that view into the primary school curriculum:

I believe that the only true education comes through the stimulation of the child’s powers by the demands of the social situations in which he fi nds himself. Through these demands he is stimu-lated to act as a member of a unity, to emerge from his original narrowness of action and feeling, and to conceive of himself from the standpoint of the welfare of the group to which he belongs. (Dewey 1897:77)

Dewey’s pragmatism and progressive philosophy of education probably infl uenced Freddy’s growth more than is generally recognized.

The Phoebe Anna Thorne School was an open school which meant that it was literally open to the air most of the year and heated very spar-ingly in winter. The one story school building was called the Pagoda and it had large glass win-

Figure 1. View of the Bryn Mawr campus around the turn of the century. Photographer unknown. Photograph courtesy of Bryn Mawr College Library.

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Davis: Frederica de Laguna of Bryn Mawr College 23

dows on all sides which could be opened wide. Early photos show the girls at their desks wear-ing parkas with hoods and cut off mittens so they could hold their pencils (Fig. 2). Education in the fresh air was an import from Europe at the begin-ning of the twentieth century. The idea was that it would promote good health and vigor, help those with anemia, and help prevent tuberculosis. The outdoor environment continued to play a role at home. Freddy slept out on a porch at Yarrow East from her earliest days. Her father took charge of carefully wrapping her to protect her from the cold night air. Freddy characterized herself as be-ing something of a sickly child having in turn se-vere colic, acute appendicitis, brucellosis from contaminated milk, radiation sickness from the x-ray treatment for brucellosis, and various allergies. Nevertheless, by the time she was a young adult she felt healthy and strong and enjoyed long hikes with her family and friends. Apparently the out-door conditioning agreed with her.

During her junior year at Thorne (1921–1922) Freddy went abroad with her mother and father who were on sabbatical from Bryn Mawr. She boarded at the Lycée de Jeunes Filles in Versailles. She found it hard to get to know the French girls and she became closest to two girls from the French colony of Martinique. She gradually rec-ognized that, like her, they were outsiders. Only some years later did she come to understand that they were “mulattoes”; at the time she absolutely did not perceive “color” differences.

Freddy was 16 when she graduated from the Thorne School and her family fi rst thought she should attend Cornell University, her mother’s

alma matter. But then they decided that Freddy was too young to live away in upstate New York, and that Bryn Mawr College was the better choice. Freddy was very happy with this decision and never seemed to regret it. She enrolled in the fall of 1923 after passing the usual week-long battery of entrance exams including English Composition, English Literature, Latin Prose Authors, Latin Po-ets, Latin Composition, French, Ancient History, Modern European History, Geometry, Algebra, and Physics or Chemistry. She said of the entrance ex-ams in a 1974 Bryn Mawr College Resources Offi ce newsletter that they “gave [Bryn Mawr] the rep-utation of being the hardest college to enter and therefore offered a noble challenge.” At Bryn Mawr Freddy majored in Political Science and Econom-ics (in one department at the time). Among other interests, she read a lot of Marx and pursued de-veloping a universal theory of value. She vividly remembered becoming enthralled with studying history through the use of primary sources. She found it exciting to delve into history with Profes-sor Howard L. Gray. He was well known for his re-search on the English Enclosure movement. This is where, no doubt, the spur to her life long involve-ment with historical analysis began.

Something about her character can be found in the following story she told many years after the fact to a reporter for the Bryn Mawr College News in 1966. The student reporter was doing a story about Freddy’s student days and asked Miss de La-guna “what is Bryn Mawr?” to her. Freddy, a non-smoker, related that when she was a student she worked hard to end the smoking ban at the Col-lege. (In fact this is about the only extra-curricular activity Freddy noted about her college days.) Many girls smoked back in the 1920s but it was strictly against Bryn Mawr’s rules. Katherine Hep-burn (a year behind Freddy in the Class of 1928) famously used to smoke in the Baptist Church cemetery across the street from the College. Freddy said to the young reporter, “A broken rule under-mines the community.” Freddy may have been an independent sort, but she wanted to preserve and enhance community at Bryn Mawr. Perhaps here we can detect echoes of Dewey from her Thorne days?

Freddy’s undergraduate student record was outstanding. She graduated with the Class of 1927 summa cum laude and was awarded by the faculty the European Fellowship, the highest honor the College can bestow upon a student. The European Fellowship provided funds for a year’s post grad-uate study abroad. Freddy took excellent advan-tage of her time abroad afforded by the Fellowship in 1928–29 following her fi rst year of graduate study at Columbia University. While on the Euro-pean Fellowship, she studied British and French prehistory in the fi eld with the American School

Figure 2. Phoebe Anna Thorne School. Photograph courtesy of Bryn Mawr College Library.

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24 Arctic Anthropology 43:2

of Prehistoric Research, met and heard lectures in Paris with the Abbé Breuil, and then enrolled in a course taught by Bronislaw Malinowski at the London School of Economics (McClellan 1988). In the summer of 1929 she began her celebrated six month trip to Greenland as Therkel Mathias-sen’s fi eld assistant. From that time on Freddy was a committed fi eld anthropologist; her life course was set.

Close to the time Freddy graduated from Bryn Mawr, her parents happened to hear a lecture by Franz Boas, the famous anthropologist teaching at Columbia University. They concluded that Colum-bia would be an excellent place for Freddy’s grad-uate education, for she could study anthropology under Boas’ guidance. Freddy readily took to her parents’ advice and headed to New York City in the fall of 1927.

Freddy’s fi rst two decades of life were as close to Bryn Mawr College as anyone could possi-bly be. Daughter of two faculty, resident of faculty housing, schooled at home and at a campus model school, student at the college where she knew most of the faculty for years and grew up call-ing some of them uncle and aunt, and fi nally hon-ored by the faculty with the European Fellowship, Freddy could truly call Bryn Mawr home.

Beyond Bryn Mawr and Back Again: 1927–1938

The next decade saw her pass through graduate school at Columbia, do her inaugural fi eld work in Greenland with Therkel Mathiassen, break off her engagement to an Englishman, launch major fi eld work projects in Alaska, author two mystery nov-els and numerous articles and monographs, and then receive an appointment to teach anthropology at . . . Bryn Mawr (Fig. 3)!

Freddy moved rapidly through Columbia un-der the guidance of Franz Boas. He gave her full academic credit for her year abroad under the Bryn Mawr European Fellowship. Boas suggested her Ph.D. thesis topic, which was to examine the rela-tionship of the Magdalenian cave painters of Eu-rope to the ethnographically known Eskimo on the basis of their art. At the time it was widely con-sidered that the Eskimo were descendents of late Upper Paleolithic people who migrated to the po-lar regions as the Pleistocene ice retreated. Freddy pursued this topic and her dissertation was subse-quently published in the American Journal of Ar-chaeology (AJA) (de Laguna 1932–1933). The Bryn Mawr connection in this case was that the editor of AJA was Mary Swindler, Professor of Latin at Bryn Mawr, who knew Freddy well when she was a student. Swindler thoroughly worked over Fred-dy’s dissertation to get it into print.

Freddy’s initial appointment at Bryn Mawr came in 1938 when she was hired as a Lecturer to teach an introductory anthropology course which was to be a non-required elective for the sociology major. Bryn Mawr contacted Boas for recommen-dations for the post, and he originally favored Al-exander Lesser for the position. Leslie Spier, how-ever, wrote a strong letter on behalf of Freddy, and his recommendation carried the day (McClellan 1985). In her second year Freddy wanted to add a course on American Archaeology to the curricu-lum. New courses had to be approved by the fac-ulty and Rhys Carpenter, Professor of Greek and Classical Archaeology, was charged with making the decision. He approved Freddy’s proposal pro-viding that she teach South American archaeology as well as North American. Freddy bridled at be-ing told what to teach and was disinclined to cover South America because she had no background at all in that area. Nevertheless, she agreed. President of the College Marian E. Park received a substan-tial sum as an Alumnae gift (the full amount was not revealed to Freddy until years later) to support the new course and an archaeological fi eld school in the Southwest near Flagstaff, Arizona. Freddy

Figure 3. Freddy, photograph taken in 1935. Pho-tograph courtesy of the Alaska State Library, DeLaguna-1.

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Davis: Frederica de Laguna of Bryn Mawr College 25

had spent two summers at the Museum of North-ern Arizona in 1939 and 1940 studying and visit-ing sites and was well versed in Southwest archae-ology. The fi eld school ran for nine weeks in the summer of 1941. It was designed for eight weeks, but at the students’ insistence it ran for another week when they fi gured they had enough money to keep digging a while longer. Freddy’s excite-ment with fi eldwork obviously rubbed off on her charges. It must be one of the earliest examples of a women’s college archaeological fi eld school, and it defi nitely refl ects Freddy’s determination to bring the full professional experience to under-graduate women (Fig. 4).

Post War to Retirement—Building the Anthropology Department

Freddy left Bryn Mawr in 1942 for the U.S. Navy at the outbreak of World War II. The new President of the College, Katharine Elizabeth McBride, con-sidered Freddy’s wartime service of less value than teaching at Bryn Mawr and made her feelings plain

to Freddy. The relations between the two remained frosty thereafter. After the war Freddy returned to Bryn Mawr hoping to have a promotion to a higher rank, but was continued as an Assistant Professor for the next three years.

With Freddy as chair, the Department of Sociology and Anthropology in 1950 had one an-thropologist and one sociologist. Freddy taught a wide range of courses including sociology (which she essentially construed as American culture). President McBride had a vision to establish an in-stitute at Bryn Mawr akin to Harvard’s Institute of Social Relations which would combine soci-ology, social anthropology, and psychology. Ev-idently McBride’s concept of social science did not include the four fi eld Boasian American an-thropology which Freddy was eager to establish. It is greatly to Freddy’s credit that her vision ulti-mately prevailed and that a separate department of anthropology was fi nally created in 1966. She was eventually able to bring in faculty who could teach physical anthropology, linguistics, and ar-chaeology. As a separate department, Anthropol-ogy formed its own Ph.D. program and Hiroko Hara became its fi rst doctoral candidate. President McBride, ever wary of de Laguna’s department, placed herself as chair of Hiroko Hara’s committee “. . . so that she could see whether we were pro-ducing anything worthwhile” (McClellan 1985:290). Thus Freddy persevered and the department began to grow.

Freddy made a number of material additions to the department which last to this day and are in frequent use. In the 1950s the Academy of Nat-ural Sciences in Philadelphia held sizeable col-lections in American archaeology and ethnogra-phy, but had decided to focus on natural history alone. Freddy was able to obtain a good part of the collection on permanent loan at the time the new anthropology department was created, and she even found steel cabinets for it. The collection in-cludes pre-Columbian Peruvian textiles and pot-tery, Southwestern basketry and pottery, Plains Indians ethnographic material, Danish Neolithic chipped and ground stone, and even some arti-facts from the Swiss “lake dwellings” collected in the mid-nineteenth century. It forms the core of the department’s teaching collection today. Freddy also gathered a nearly complete collection of the Wenner-Gren fossil hominid casts which supple-mented the plaster of Paris casts she had obtained earlier. Freddy successfully applied to the Na-tional Science Foundation for an equipment grant that enabled the department to furnish its lab and purchase some fi eld equipment as well. From the 1950s onward Freddy built a slide collection for teaching ethnography and archaeology. It has very wide coverage and many excellent images drawn from all areas of the world and from the Paleolithic

Figure 4. Freddy in Alaska. Photograph courtesy of Bryn Mawr College Library.

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26 Arctic Anthropology 43:2

to the present. There are upward of 3000 slides all meticulously labeled and mounted in glass. Each slide also has its own 3 � 5 card with detailed in-formation about the source and subject of the im-age. In this day of digital projection we still make good use of the slides through scanning and Photo-shop enhancement.

As Freddy’s reputation grew and she became widely known, she was often invited for speaking engagements. From the beginning Freddy donated her honoraria to the Frederica de Laguna Fund for Anthropology at Bryn Mawr College. The fund has long been used to help undergraduates fi nance fi eld work opportunities during the summer and to get them engaged in anthropological research. The fund continues to be of importance and we want to encourage its growth (Readers take note!).

As a teacher, Freddy challenged her students in many ways, and she was known as a demanding instructor with long reading lists and numerous writing assignments. Looking over her introduc-tory anthropology syllabus of 1954 would cause undergraduates of today to tremble. Freddy devel-oped a handbook on taking notes and research pa-per writing we still offer to students today. She re-ally insisted on students taking complete notes with full citations, and in many of her courses had students hand in weekly reviews of their reading. As the following excerpt from her 1954–55 An-thropology 101 syllabus shows, Freddy encour-aged the practice of meticulous scholarship from her students:

Suggestions on Taking Notes and Writing Reports

Notes which you expect to throw away soon and which are intended only to help you remember something until after the exam can be in any form under heaven. But notes that you may have to keep for an indefi nite time or that you will need for writing a report ought to be more carefully taken and ought to be in a form that will make your writ-ing easy. They must tell you not only what was written, but by whom, when, in what publication, and on what page, because this is what you will need to know eventually, and if you take careful notes in the beginning, you may never need to go back to the original book again.

Freddy taught for just ten more years af-ter the independent Department of Anthropology was established. Near her retirement she was hon-ored with the William R. Kenan Professorship in Anthropology and the Lindback Award for dis-tinguished teaching. But her work at the depart-ment level is what brought her the greatest sense of fulfi llment. In response to the 1970 decen-nial Alumnae questionnaire question about what had brought her satisfaction at Bryn Mawr Freddy wrote: “I have had to work so hard to establish the

present Department of Anthropology—only now, near retirement do I see accomplished what I’ve hoped for so long.” Some years later when she was cleaning out her desk at the time of her retirement she found a note she had written to herself back in the 1950s about her dream for the Department of Anthropology. It should have fi ve or six full time faculty, two labs, and a full time secretary she wrote. At the time of her retirement her wish list was almost fulfi lled with fi ve faculty, a small lab, and a secretary. Freddy could move on without re-gret (Fig. 5).

When Freddy retired from Bryn Mawr in 1975, friends and colleagues organized a day long program in her honor. Kitty McClellan, Tony Wal-lace, Cora DuBois, Helen Codere, and Toni Flores Fratto all spoke to a large crowd. Kitty McClel-lan proclaimed “de Laguna power” to the assem-bled guests as “that quality of teaching and friend-ship which succeeds in making us realize our own power.” Later at the reception they all toasted to “de Laguna power.” McClellan’s toast is indeed apt; Freddy enabled multitudes of students, col-leagues, and people she lived with in the fi eld to see themselves more clearly and to marshal their intellectual forces effectively.

Figure 5. Freddy as a senior professor at Bryn Mawr College. Photograph courtesy of Bryn Mawr College Library.

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Davis: Frederica de Laguna of Bryn Mawr College 27

Freddy after “Retirement”When Freddy retired from the department in 1975 at the age of 68, she was only about two-thirds of the way through her professional career. Much more was to come. In terms of the department she took a pretty much hands-off approach, letting those in the department fi nd their own way for-ward, backward, and side to side in the thickets of academe. She was not reluctant to let us know what she thought, but she defi nitely spoke from the sidelines. Without question the biggest disap-pointment came in 1987 when the Administration made a decision to terminate the Graduate Pro-gram in Anthropology. “It was as if a major part of my life’s work were lost,” she added to the McClel-lan interview transcript in Sep tem ber of that year. But she concluded hopefully, “This cannot be the end of the story.”

Freddy embodied the department at Bryn Mawr. Through her our faculty feels a direct, al-most palpable link to the foundations of American Anthropology. Her legacy includes the enthusias-tic support for a broadly conceived anthropology incorporating cultural and biological things pres-

ent and past, fi eld work as the ultimate source of anthropological knowledge, and the need to keep advancing the interests of anthropology in the col-lege and beyond. We should never take for granted that our vision of anthropology will be held to by others. We have to make it anew each day.

References Citedde Laguna, Frederica1932– A Comparison of Eskimo and Paleolithic Art. 1933 American Journal of Archaeology 36(4):477–

551; 38(1):77–107.

1985 Life History of Frederica de Laguna. Interviewed by Catharine McClellan. Interview transcript on fi le, Bryn Mawr College Library Archives.

Dewey, John1897 My Pedagogic Creed. The School Journal 54(3):

77–80.

McClellan, Catharine1988 Frederica de Laguna. In Women Anthropologists.

U. Gacs, A. Kahn, J. McIntyre, and R. Weinberg, eds. Pp. 37– 44. New York: Greenwood Press.

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