"
[From a poem, "A Mountain Soul," by Katharine Lee Bates, 1904.]
CHAPTER IV
THE STUDENTS AT WORK AND PLAY
The safest general statement which can be made about Wellesley
students of the first forty years of the college is that more than
sixty per cent of them have come from outside New England, from
the Middle West, the Far West, and the South. Possibly there is
a Wellesley type. Whether or not it could be differentiated from
the Smith, the Bryn Mawr, the Vassar, and the Mt. Holyoke types,
if the five were set up in a row, unlabeled, is a question. Yet
it is true that certain recognizable qualities have developed and
tend to persist among the students of Wellesley.
Wellesley girls are in the best sense democratic. There is no
Gold Coast on the campus or in the village; money carries no
social prestige. More money is spent, and more frivolously, than
in the early days; there are more girls, and more rich girls, to
spend it; yet the indifference to it except as a mechanical
convenience, a medium of exchange and an opportunity for service,
continues to be naively Utopian.
But money is not the only touchstone of democratic sensitiveness.
At Wellesley there has always been uneasiness at the hint of
unequal opportunity.
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