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FeedScut Work
Like many job-hunting new graduates, Woodrow Wilson took what he could get.
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New graduates rarely get dream jobs. First, dues must be paid, coffee brought and scut work done.
That’s how it was for Thomas Woodrow Wilson who, after receiving his doctorate in history from Johns Hopkins University in 1885, took a job teaching women at newly established Bryn Mawr College. A position in which he reported to a female supervisor (ouch!).
Ellen Wilson—like her husband, a Southerner who feared “strong-minded women”—thought it “absurd” and “unnatural” that her husband should stoop to teach females. She worried that Wilson would “find it very unpleasant to serve, as it were, under a woman.” But Wilson did what he had to do. For three years, he taught Bryn Mawr’s girls, whom he described as “too literal and unimaginative.” Then, at the first opportunity, he made his escape to Wesleyan University.
“I have for a long time been hungry for a class of men,” Wilson wrote to his friend, Robert Bridges, in 1888, explaining the move. Later, of course, he ended up in the White House, where politics forced him to support the necessary evil of women’s suffrage.
Born in Virginia and raised in Georgia, Wilson was the son of a Presbyterian minister. His grandfather had published an abolitionist newspaper in Steubenville, Ohio. But after Wilson’s parents moved south in 1851, they adjusted their sectional loyalties accordingly.
Wilson’s father, Joseph, defended slavery, owned slaves and served briefly in the Confederate army. Yet, the Wilsons didn’t nurture Lost Cause fantasies. In 1881, a 25-year-old Wilson wrote a cousin, Harriet Woodrow, that he opposed “all the parade and speech-making and sentimentality of Decoration Day” (the Southern version of Memorial Day) for perpetuating hatreds of the war years.
Yet Wilson was a thorough Southerner who inherited his region’s contempt for career women. In 1884, he attended—perhaps for amusement—a Women’s Congress meeting of the Association for the Advancement of Women in Baltimore. Writing afterward to his wife, he described the “chilled, scandalized feeling that always overcomes me when I see and hear women speak in public.”
Commenting on one speaker, “a severely dressed person from Boston, an old maid from the straitest (sic) sect of old maid,” Wilson called the woman “a living example—and lively commentary—of what might be done by giving men’s places and duties to women.”
In the post-Victorian era, such views were more the norm than the exception.
Wilson was 9 years old before he learned the alphabet, and 11 by the time he learned to read. One charitable biographer, Ray S. Baker, suggested that he didn’t need to. Wilson’s parents and older sisters spent evenings reading aloud, so all he had to do was listen. More recent writers think he may have been dyslexic.
Never a top student, Wilson succeeded in class by working hard and doing everything he could to please a demanding father. He graduated from Princeton in 1879, then attended law school for a year but did not graduate.
