Arthur Gilman
Alton, Illinois, 1837 - 1909, Atlantic City, New Jersey
Gilman married Amy Cooke Ball, of Lee, Massachusetts, in 1860; the couple had four children. In 1862, because of bad health, Gilman was forced to leave New York and the banking firm and moved to Lenox, Massachusetts. There he became interested in public education and was a member of the local school committee, visiting and evaluating schools in the area. During this time Gilman also began writing. In 1869 he published The Gilman Family Traced in the Line of Honorable John Gilman, of Exeter, N.H., and in 1870 he published First Steps in English Literature, a textbook. In addition to writing, Gilman became editor for the American Tract Society in Boston in 1871, and when he moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1872, he was enlisted as a literary adviser for the Riverside Press.
In 1876 Gilman was married a second time, to Stella Houghton Scott, of Tuscaloosa, Alabama, with whom he had three children. (It is not known how his first marriage ended.) Before her marriage, Stella Scott had received her education at Ingham University in Leroy, New York, and was head of the English literature department at Bradford Academy in New York. Some months prior to the summer of 1878, Gilman and his wife became interested in the possibility of the education of women at Harvard University. In Cambridge Sketches by Cambridge Authors, Gilman states that the idea "became a personal matter with [him] on account of the interest that [his] wife and [he] took in a certain young lady at the moment attending one of the schools for girls in Cambridge, who seemed to have reached the limit of the advantages that it offered." Gilman "conceived a plan" whereby women would receive instruction from the professors at Harvard, "but outside of the college and without responsibility to it." In November 1878 Gilman presented the idea to one of the professors at Harvard, who also supported the plan. Having received this endorsement, Gilman wrote a letter outlining his proposal to Harvard president Charles Eliot on 23 December 1878. Eliot approved, and Gilman, along with his wife and several other women, began working to set the plan in motion. Once an appropriate number of Harvard professors agreed to participate in the project, Gilman and these women officially formed the Private Collegiate Instruction for Women in 1879. The circular issued in February "announced in rather vague terms that some of the professors of Harvard College had consented to give instruction to properly prepared women of a grade not below that which they gave to men" (Merrill, p. 190). For the first three years this program was run entirely on a volunteer basis by Gilman and several women. But in August 1882 a need for more money and space necessitated a more formal organization, and the program became known as the Society for the Collegiate Instruction for Women. Gilman based the success of the project on the fact that the organizers "were exponents of no 'cause,' and were known only as persons interested in the best instruction of women" (Merrill, p. 193).
During the time Gilman conceived and instituted this plan, he continued to publish his writings. In 1879 Gilman's Shakespeare's Morals appeared. Also in that year, Houghton, Osgood, and Company published The Poetical Works of Geoffrey Chaucer in three volumes, which Gilman edited, being the first to use the Ellesmere manuscript of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. In addition, Gilman compiled the index for the 1884 edition of Harper's Complete Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Along with these, Gilman wrote, edited, and collaborated on numerous works included in the Story of the Nations Series published by G. P. Putnam's Sons in New York between 1885 and 1904; he also edited Theatrum Majorum: The Cambridge of 1776 (1876) and wrote Tales of the Pathfinders (1884); and Short Stories from the Dictionary (1886).
In March 1894, when the Society for the Collegiate Instruction for Women became Radcliffe College, Gilman was appointed regent of the school and remained in that position until 1895. Over the years Gilman's role in creating Radcliffe College has become overshadowed by the parts certain women played in the project. Gilman continued to write on a variety of topics until his death in Atlantic City, New Jersey.
Bibliography
Gilman's papers are in the Radcliffe Archives, and his letters are in Harvard's Schlesinger Library. Other works written or edited by Gilman include First Steps in General History: A Suggestive Outline (1874) and Magna Charta Stories (1882). Although there are no comprehensive indexes to all of the writings of Gilman, the Dictionary of American Biography provides an ample list. Any writings not included there may be found in the libraries of Harvard University. A short history of Gilman's life is in The Gilman Family (1869). For Gilman's account of the events that led to the incorporation of Radcliffe College, see Estelle M. H. Merrill, Cambridge Sketches by Cambridge Authors (1896). Obituaries are in the New York Evening Post and the Boston Transcript, 29 Dec. 1909.
Jessica Lexie Hollis
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Jessica Lexie Hollis. "Gilman, Arthur";
http://www.anb.org/articles/16/16-00623.html;
American National Biography Online Feb. 2000.
Access Date: Fri Aug 09 2013 15:04:09 GMT-0400 (Eastern Standard Time)
Copyright © 2000 American Council of Learned Societies.
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