Maine Women Writers Collection

Mary Ellen Chase in Montana

Recently, a researcher inquired about Mary Ellen Chase’s tenure as a teacher at the Hillside Home School in Hillside, Wisconsin.  It is always a treat to have the opportunity to dig in to a collection that I have only fleeting familiarity with, reading letters and getting a real sense of that author’s thought processes and concerns.  Upon finishing this research, I feel like I have a much better understanding of Chase as a person and a writer.

After her graduation from the University of Maine in 1909, Chase was encouraged by a teacher to head West to find work.  She taught in boarding and public schools in Wisconsin, Chicago and Montana before her entry into a Ph.D. program at the University of Minnesota, where she taught while she studied.  In 1926, she was hired by Smith College, where she remained for the entirety of her professorial career.

In a 1936 interview in the Portland Sunday Telegram, Chase declared,
“My writing of books is a sideline.  It is not my main job or the one I like most to be identified with.  I love to teach, and only occasionally love to write.  But I do write, largely because I want to acquaint others with the background of Maine life, with the splendid character of Maine people, and with the unsurpassed loveliness of Maine fields, shores and sea. . . .  Next to my teaching I love best to roam around the country at home or in England and study flowers.  I have learned a fair amount both in England and in Maine, although I cannot claim to be an authority.  I love to cook and to sew, and I must admit my tastes lie far more in ordinary walks of life than in authorship.  I have read all my life; and my chief worry about the next world (wherever and whatever it is) is that my favorite books may not be among its blessings!”

Her letters from the Hillside Home School discuss another ordinary pleasure of her life–being in the company of young people.  She writes of longing for children of her own, how much she looks forward to settling into the role of wife and mother.

I found Chase’s longing for motherhood particularly interesting since, after her arrival at Smith, she met Eleanor Shipley Duckett, who would be her life-long companion.  I should not have been surprised by Chase’s desire for marriage and children, as even if she had found herself attracted to other women during her youth, there were no role models of happy same-gendered couples.  It seems, though, that Chase settled into a contented life with Duckett, despite the absence of children in their household.  Duckett’s portrait of Chase for the March 1962 issue of the Colby Library Quarterly describes their comfortable routine together at home, and offers great insight into Chase’s character.

Duckett wrote, “For more than thirty years Mary Ellen Chase and I have shared a home on the campus of Smith College, Northampton, Massachusetts.  Together we have crossed the Atlantic more often than we can recall.  Year by year we have walked the Meadows from Cambridge to Grantchester; year by year we have climbed the Mendip hills in Somerset. . . .  And then we have come home again, I and my friend Mary, to teach in Smith, to plan for our students, to write our books, to watch the fortunes of war and peace in our world.

How am I to picture her?  Perhaps to those who talk with her their first experience comes through her amazing vitality.  From the days when as a child she stood swaying upon the white gate before the house in Blue Hill, Maine, looking for whatsoever excitement might chance to come or go along the road outside, “between the sky and the sea,” she has seized every moment that called to her fro action or decision or debate.  It is Mary who may be counted on to keep a dinner party alive with laughter; to speak with courage at a time of horrid crisis; to rise from a sick-bed to write another chapter of her book in a hospital chair; to argue vehemently and in all pleasantness questions of world politics.” (pp. 1-2)

Chase’s complexity comes through in all of the biographies of her included in the collection.  Her sister-in-law, Evelyn Hyman Chase, shared the following perspective on Chase’s life in the Summer 1987 issue of Smith Alumnae Quaterly:

“On subsequent days and in subsequent years class discussions led to Mary’s revealing why she made own choice between the two accepted routes toward life’s gratifications: marriage or career.  She had chosen the path of career; had chosen to remain unmarried.  When the Smith girls asked if she were satisfied with her choice, she said, “I don’t need to get married; instead of my own child, I have my youngest brother Newton to nurture and guide.”  …  “And every time I finish a book,” Mary went on, “it is as if I had had another child.”  She said her novels about life on the Maine coast and its sailing ships were just as satisfactory children to her as Newton.  These books…all described several generations of women–women whose roles were chosen for them by custom, women who triumphed over the forces and challenges of nature but all within a social structure dictated by unchanging Puritan tradition–a structure that Mary did not question.” (pp. 18-19)

While it is unclear what the true nature of the companionship was between Duckett and Chase, the certainty is that Chase’s choice to be a writer and teacher over a mother and wife set her apart from most of her peers.  Evelyn Hyman Chase’s biography of Mary Ellen Chase recounts Chase’s reaction to reading Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique.  Chase believed that this book should be required reading for all undergraduates, and she wrote to Friedan to tell her so.  Mary Ellen Chase lived just long enough to see women’s liberation take off (she died in 1973).  I wonder what she would say to the developments that have happened for women over the past 50 years.