Education: Spouse Trap

To the 930 girls at Stephens College in Columbia, Mo. their ruddy, rotund President James Madison Wood is affectionately known as “Daddy.” For three days last week Stephens’ rolling campus, bridle paths and dormitories were thronged with 600 old Stephens graduates, assembled for a special meeting of their alumnae association. Together with 1,500 other guests including Mrs. Ruth Bryan Rohde, they were particularly eager to shake “Daddy’s” hand and take tea at his trim Georgian house. By night the campus was aglow with two dozen giant silver candles, for this week James Madison Wood will celebrate his silver jubilee by graduating his 25th Stephens class, whose members will wear silver gowns and mortar boards.

Few U. S. college presidents started their careers so unpromisingly as James Madison Wood, who was born in a log cabin at Hartville, Mo. 61 years ago. At the age of 21, when he married Hartville’s Lela Raney, he was a humble country schoolteacher. He did not get his bachelor’s degree from the University of Missouri until he was 31. Five years later, when he was an instructor at the State Normal School in Springfield, Mo., he was offered the presidency of debt-laden, Baptist Stephens and accepted immediately. Within ten years President Wood had not only doubled Stephens’ enrollment and accumulated an endowment of $1,600,000 but made his college the talk of educators all over the U. S.

Keynote of “Daddy” Wood’s educational creed is: “Girls aren’t men. Why restrict them to a masculine diet?” While other girls’ schools seemed determined to be as much like men’s colleges as possible, Stephens developed in precisely the opposite direction. A junior college where most students take only a two-year course, Stephens is equipped with a streamlined curriculum which makes girls worry little over mathematics or Greek, lets them concentrate instead on such subjects as Elementary Music, Consumers’ Problems, Principles of Dietetics, Tap Dancing, Expressive Speech. The courses are grouped to correspond with the seven main divisions which sprightly President Wood and Psychologist Wernett W. Charters made of women’s problems: ethical, physical, mental, social, communicative, esthetic, budgetary. Psychologist Charters, who was engaged by Stephens in 1922 to help President Wood decide how women differed from men, has since collected and analyzed some 7.400 women’s problems.

No idle theorist. President Wood gives his students, who come from 40 States but largely from small midwestern towns, many concrete aids to success. Stephens girls are taught to dress and wear their hair becomingly by a “groomer” imported from Manhattan. Almost all the student body plays golf on the college’s nine-hole course or rides on the college’s 36 gaited horses, which are magnificently kept in a stable large enough to afford indoor riding on rainy days. Girls are encouraged to diet, exercise, take a daily siesta. They are also encouraged to meet boys at the weekly Burrall Bible Class, which is conducted jointly with nearby University of Missouri. Each spring a good share of the student body goes on a long junket with “Daddy” Wood. This year the college chartered a steamer which cruised from New Orleans to New York, where the junketeers were taken not only to libraries and museums but to the racy French Casino restaurant. This additional cultural advantage costs each girl about $150. President Wood has kept Stephens’ basic charge for board, room and tuition down to $825 annually.

Although Stephens’ most prominent alumna is Joan Crawford (who went there for six months in 1923), Stephens’ Wood is firmly persuaded that the chief career for which any woman prepares herself is marriage. He figures that 87% of his girls are married within five years of graduation, a computation which moved American Magazine to refer to Stephens as a “spouse trap.” To scoffers “Daddy” Wood likes to reply: “A girl is the loveliest thing that God ever created.”