Alice Gordon Gulick (8 Aug. 1847- 14 Sep. 1903) advocate of women’s education and dean of women for the Harvard Cuban Summer School of 1900, was born Alice Winfield Gordon, in Boston, Massachusetts. She was the eldest of seven children of James M. Gordon, treasurer of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM), and Mary Clarkson Gordon. Alice moved with her family to the nearby suburb of Auburndale when she was eight years old, enabling a bucolic childhood that remained a short trainride from Boston’s museums and other mainstays of upper middle-class life. [94 words]

In 1863, aged 16, she entered Mount Holyoke Seminary (now College), the oldest of the “Seven Sisters” of elite colleges for women. Accomplished, popular and viewed by her peers and teachers as a leader, she graduated in 1867, remaining two more years to teach on the South Hadley, Massachusetts, campus. On October 3, 1870 she married Alvah P. Kittredge, a tutor at nearby Amherst College, who died the very next day of tuberculosis. Although she had plans for graduate study in music, the following year she married William Hooker Gulick, a Congregationalist minister born to a family of American missionaries in the Hawaiian Islands.

One week after the wedding the couple left for Spain, a predominantly Roman Catholic country, where many Protestant missionaries had flocked following the fall of the monarchy in 1868 and the ending of a prohibition on Christian denominations other than Catholicism. As evangelizing incomers, they met with hostility at first, but established several churches and schools in the northeast region of Santander, including a boarding school for young women, which Alice opened up in 1877. By then, the couple had five children born in Spain: William (who lived only a few days), James, Frederick, Arthur, and Elizabeth. On a voyage back to Boston in 1880, however, Arthur died of bronchitis. That summer, while mourning for her lost son and assisted in childcare duties by her mother in Auburndale, Alice Gulick overcame her fear of public speaking in order to raise awareness about the lack of educational opportunities for young women in Spain and to raise funds for an expanded school for women that would be a “Mount Holyoke College for Spain” (Gordon, 88)

The Gulick family—including newborn daughter, Alice—returned to Spain in 1881 with the backing of the ABCFM board to move the girls’ school 100 miles east, to San Sebastian on the Bay of Biscay. El Colegio Norte Americano flourished and was received by locals with less hostility than in Santander. The school’s reputation was also enhanced by testimonials from American visitors like the social reformer, Jane Addams, came to the school to meet the famed and respected “Doña Alicia.” In pursuit of funds, Gulick voyaged to America in 1887, after the birth of a seventh child, Grace Gordon, but was forced to return by her daughter Alice’s grave illness. A longer sojourn to the U.S. in 1890-1892 secured further backing with a Massachusetts charter for the school, now incorporated as “the International Institute for Girls in Spain.” In honor of her achievements Mount Holyoke College awarded her and honorary degree in 1894.

In 1898, while Gulick was on another fund-raising drive in America, war broke out between the U.S. and Spain. Many reporters approached Gulick, a long-time Spanish resident with a growing reputation among American educators and reformers, for her views on the conflict. She responded by urging Americans to make distinctions between the government of Spain and working- and middle-class Spaniards conscripted to fight in Cuba and the Philippines against their wishes. Optimistic that the war would lead to liberation for the masses of Spaniards as well as the people of Cuba, Gulick quoted her fellow Bostonian, the poet Henry W. Longfellow, in hoping that “the foot of the tyrant shall be shaken from the neck of Spain.” (Gordon, 141).

Although her friends had opposed Gulick’s wishes to serve as a nurse in Cuba, for fear of her health, she volunteered her language skills and knowledge of Spanish culture to aid Red Cross efforts among 1600 Spanish prisoners of war quartered in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. Doña Alicia’s efforts were applauded by American naval officials, the Spanish prisoners, and the Spanish press.

In February 1899 Gulick returned to the International Institute, whose students, faculty, and books had moved to Biarritz, France, during the Spanish-American war. Later that year she returned to Boston to raise funds to build a new campus and college hall for the Institute in Madrid, an effort supported by Alice Freeman Palmer, former president of Wellesley College and dean of women at the University of Chicago. Gulick’s friendships with New England educators like Freeman Palmer and Wellesley professors Katherine Coman and Katherine Bates, and her wartime service in Portsmouth made her an obvious candidate to serve as Dean of Women at the six-week long Summer School for Cuban teachers at Harvard University in 1900. Harvard president Charles W. Eliot also knew the Gulicks through their son, James Gordon Gulick, an 1898 graduate of Harvard College, who was serving as Inspector of Public Instruction at Puerto Rico when he died of meningitis in December 1899.

Fluent in Spanish, Gulick provided translation and emotional support for the Cuban teachers, hosted Cuban women teachers at the home of Alice Palmer Freeman, where she was resident for the duration of the School, and devised guidelines for the Boston area students who served as summer school chaperones. More than half of the 1270 Cuban visitors were women. Gulick was present at all the major ceremonies, social events, and excursions for the teachers. Her perfect Castilian Spanish culture, her engaging personality, and her unflappability endeared her not only to the visitors, but also to their chaperones, teachers, and Harvard staff, who did not possess her deep understanding of the language, culture, and customs of their guests. Another friend, Alice Longfellow, daughter of the poet, co-hosted poetry readings at her home and accompanied Gulick to say farewell to the departing Cubans that August. She believed that “Mrs. Gulick was the heart and head of everything and certainly contributed in very large measure to the success of that wonderful summer.” (Gordon, 197). President Eliot agreed. In sending her a “modest honorarium” for her efforts, he wrote: “Your knowledge of the language and customs of the University’s guests has enabled you to guide and help them in innumerable ways, and your friendly sympathy has been very precious to many of them.” (Gordon, 197).

Gulick then returned to Biarritz and over the next three years was tireless in her efforts to secure funding for an expanded International Institute for Girls in Madrid. Her son Frederick, who had provided music for many of the social events at the Cuban Summer School. died suddenly in September 1901. One year later, Gulick herself died, of tuberculosis, in London, aged 56, just a few weeks before the official opening of the Madrid campus of the International Institute for Girls. The Alice Gordon Gulick Memorial Hall at the Institute was completed in 1910.

Further Reading

Alice Gordon Gulick’s papers related to the 1900 Harvard Summer School for Cuban teachers are in the Harvard University Archives, Cambridge, Massachusetts. Her other personal and business papers are maintained at Mount Holyoke College Archives and Special Collections in South Hadley, Massachusetts.

1. “Alice Gordon Gulick,” Mount Holyoke College. Celebrating 175 Years of Women of Influence
https://www.mtholyoke.edu/175/alice-gordon-gulick

2. Gordon, Elizabeth Putnam. Alice Gordon Gulick: Her Life and Work in Spain (1917)

3. Putney, Clifford. “The Legacy of the Gulicks, 1827–1964,” International Bulletin of Missionary Research, Vol. 25, Issue 1 (2001): 28-35. http://www.internationalbulletin.org/issues/2001-01/2001-01-028-putney.pdf