The Insider: A Life of Virginia C. Gildersleeve by Nancy Woloch

Reviewed by Marjorie N. Feld

The Insider: A Life of Virginia C. Gildersleeve
By Nancy Woloch
Columbia University Press
2022, 328 pp.

Virginia C. Gildersleeve left her most prominent mark on New York City as the influential dean of Barnard College, a position she held from 1911 to 1947. Without her “strong leadership,” wrote a colleague in the 1970s, Barnard would likely “have disappeared as an independent college for women long ago” (181).

In The Insider, Nancy Woloch offers a compelling biography of Gildersleeve, an important and difficult subject whose legacies are tangled up in many of the essential currents of US history of gender, race, class, ethnicity, sexuality, and religion. Not only was she known to be a stubborn, occasionally self-obsessed personality (just like many high-achieving men); Gildersleeve also took positions that were controversial then and now appear indefensible. Research has also been primarily limited to a highly untrustworthy autobiography. Based on extensive archival research, The Insider puts Gildersleeve squarely on the map of twentieth-century women’s education and international activism, while wrestling with her racism, classism, antisemitism, and xenophobia.

Woloch describes Gildersleeve as “white, Protestant, proud and secure,” enjoying privilege gained from her ancestry (6). Her mother, Virginia Crocheron Gildersleeve, hailed from a slaveowning family in Alabama, and attended a school in Poughkeepsie run by Milo Jewett, who became the first president of Vassar College. Her mother never returned to the South. But Woloch claims that Gildersleeve remained “much taken with the Alabama connection” and “considered herself a Southerner” (10). Gildersleeve’s father, Henry Alger Gildersleeve, was a New Yorker who rose to the rank of Lieutenant Colonel in the Union Army, near the end of the Civil War. Trained as a lawyer, he became a Supreme Court justice in the state.

Gildersleeve was born and raised in New York City, where her family’s whiteness, wealth, education, and connections, lifted her into prominence.  It was also proximity, as the family lived in Murray Hill in the 1890s, when Columbia was developing that area (until the move to Morningside Heights in 1896). Her father was friends with Nicholas Murray Butler, president of Columbia from 1902 to 1945. Gildersleeve was fortunate too in that her young adulthood paralleled the flowering of women’s education. Founded in 1889, Barnard, as Columbia’s affiliate for women students, had an appointed dean who served under Columbia’s president. Gildersleeve first enrolled at Barnard in 1895, in a class of 22 elite white women, where she joined a fraternity which formed mainly to exclude Jewish students. In these early years, then, she took advantage of, and contributed to, efforts to expand elite, white, Protestant women’s opportunities while carefully delineating the role that education was to play in preserving positions of privilege based on race, ethnicity, and class. A few years after graduating, she accepted a position at Barnard as a composition teacher; eventually, after earning a doctorate at Columbia, she taught Shakespeare. All the while, Gildersleeve angled for a position of leadership as she lobbied for the woman holding the dean’s role to have more autonomy and power in running Barnard. In late 1910, the hiring committee chose “the insider” as the dean.

Woloch refers to Gildersleeve’s strategy as “working from within” (54). She eschewed confrontation and militancy, a stance that put her at odds with more radical feminists, supporting neither the Equal Rights Amendment nor suffrage. She remained focused mainly on the educational and professional potential of elite, white women, defending the richness of a liberal arts education for Barnard’s students. She managed all the day-to-day challenges of running Barnard, and under her leadership its finances “soared” and its infrastructure grew (56). She also served on an educational policy committee at Columbia, where she managed to expand admission to Columbia’s schools for medicine, journalism, and business. Eventually, in 1928, she and her allies were successful in making the law school coeducational too. She advocated for maternity leave for women faculty, too, and for seven summers, with her support, Barnard ran a summer school for working women in cooperation with the labor movement.

Woloch writes of Gildersleeve’s personal life alongside stories of strivings and accomplishments. She stops short of calling her a lesbian, citing both the absence of that term in Gildersleeve’s own writings, the historical understanding of women’s partnerships before the commercialization and commodification of sexuality in the 1920s and ‘30s, and of course the discrimination faced by unmarried women and the rise of homophobia. But Gildersleeve had long, intimate relationships with women — first with Caroline (Cara) Spurgeon, a British literary critic, and then later with Elizabeth Reynard, a Barnard English professor. These relationships, “de facto marriages,” sustained her, as she and her partners provided shared support and intimacy (75).

With Spurgeon, Gildersleeve tapped into networks of academic women to form the International Federation of University Women (IFUW) in 1919. The IFUW aimed to “promote internationalism” and peace through friendship, and worked to “secure women’s access to higher education and academic advancement worldwide” (65). Like similar organizations, it “offered a special realm to fuse careerism and public service with personal attachment and romantic friendship” (72). Networking among women, its members hoped and claimed, would promote peace.

Out of this work emerged Gildersleeve’s second career, in international affairs. In 1940, she joined other academics on the Commission to Study the Organization of Peace, the “Shotwell Commission” affiliated with the United Nations.  Its chairs were Nicholas Murray Butler, president of Columbia, and James T. Shotwell, an old friend of Gildersleeve’s, and the Commission served as a “pressure group for internationalism,” a term which had been associated with early century pacifism, which the academics, industrialists, and lawyers on Franklin D. Roosevent’s secret war commission (the Council on Foreign Relations, in New York) turned into a brief for global American military “leadership.” Their findings influenced the UN Charter meeting in 1945, and Gildersleeve felt it an honor to serve on that commission, the only woman in the US delegation (159).  She played an important role in advocating for women’s inclusion in global peace work. Yet it was at the UN, Woloch notes, that the “feud between equal-rights feminists and their foes” was on full display: Gildersleeve held fast to an increasingly marginalized position, arguing to remove gender as a category of analysis, while others worked expressly to remove discrimination against women and achieve equality (163).

Woloch writes detailed, illustrative stories that put Gildersleeve at their center. But as with most people, her life was circumscribed, defined by a particular worldview and a limited set of priorities. It isn’t surprising to read that during her tenure as Dean, while activists and artists sparked and sustained the Harlem Renaissance just a few miles away, Gildersleeve had few interactions with the movement. Narrating interactions with Barnard’s first Black student, author and anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston, admitted in 1925, Woloch describes how Gildersleeve treated Hurston in ways that only reinforce our sense of her racism -- and that of early twentieth century institutions generally, and Barnard specifically.

Gildersleeve’s xenophobia manifested most often in statements focused on Jews, as Woloch makes clear. In a quest for a “cosmopolitan” student body from across the US, she used sharply offensive language common to her position: Barnard sought to exclude Jewish women from New York City, especially those of the “particularly crude and uneducated variety” (110). Her antisemitism extended even to public support of Nazism in the early 1930s, an “interlude of apology for fascism,” Woloch writes, that “undercuts her record of achievement” (182). As the horrors of the Holocaust delegitimized antisemitism, Gildersleeve never apologized or reckoned with her past. Instead, she simply rewrote it, fabricating a “revised” past for herself as someone “intensely concerned about the fate of Jews” (200).

During her life, some members of the public drew connections between her antisemitism and her fervent anti-Zionism. But Woloch is right to separate these developments--there were Jews who rejected Zionism and many non-Jewish anti-Zionists who were not antisemitic. Gildersleeve pointed to her affection for Arab people and nations as the root of her anti-Zionism. This affection was, to be sure, inflected with Orientalism and the desire of some Progressives to remake Arab nations in the Protestant image. Still, she saw in Zionism the makings of bitter conflict in the Middle East. With journalist Dorothy Thompson, Gildersleeve was active in the American Friends of the Middle East, a CIA-funded organization designed to cultivate closer ties between the U.S. and Middle East Arab nations. Through the 1950s, she remained active in anti-Zionist organizations, which brought to light real, often prescient, concerns about the rise of Zionism, as well as concerns about the censorship that they met in attempting to express criticism of Israel. Digging deep into her controversial positions on Jews and Zionism, Woloch explains how the pieces of Gildersleeve’s worldview fit together.

When I gave public talks about Lillian Wald, the subject of my own biographical project, audience members often asked me about my personal thoughts on Wald: did I like her? Woloch’s impressive biography might prompt the same question. Many of Gildersleeve’s positions fit with her time and context, heritage and elite upbringing. In her final pages, Woloch calls Gildersleeve at times “obtuse, self-deluded, tone-deaf, overbearing, stunningly self-confident, [and] relentlessly self-involved…” (212). To be sure, many of these characteristics might be overlooked — or even celebrated — in a man. We may complete The Insider without sincere affection for Gildersleeve. But she commands our consideration as someone who left an important mark on New York City, higher education, and women’s internationalism in the twentieth century.  The Insider, then, has essential lessons for its readers.

Marjorie N. Feld is Professor of History at Babson College in Massachusetts. She is the author of Lillian Wald: A Biography, Nations Divided: American Jews and the Struggle Over Apartheid, and the forthcoming The Threshold of Dissent: A History of American Jewish Critics of Zionism.