SOURCE: "Reading and Ambition: M. Carey Thomas and Female Heroism," in American Quarterly, Vol. 45, No. 1, March, 1993, pp. 73-103.

In the following essay, Sicherman analyzes Thomas's reading and its relation to expanding social roles for women in the late nineteenth century.

"[T]he fact is," fourteen-year-old Minnie Thomas declared in 1871: "I don't care much for any thing except dreaming about being grand & noble & famous but that I can never be." She did become famous as M. Carey Thomas, president of Bryn Mawr College, where she provided a model and an environment that promoted ambition in other female dreamers. As an adolescent she hoped to show "that the woman who has fought all the battles of olden time over again whilest reading the spirited pages of Homer Vergil Heroditus . . . been carried away by Carlyle & 'mildly enchanted by Emerson' .. . is not any less like what God really intended a woman to...