Mary C. Wheeler wrote in 1878, “A woman is a different creature from the moment she knows she is dependent on no one but her own self.”
Mary Wheeler was definitely a different creature from many women of her generation. Too early to be a “new woman” independently traveling with her bicycle and not explicitly feminist agitating for suffrage or temperance. However, she was feminist in the sense that she believed in giving girls a solid education at a time when girls were generally relegated to domesticity. She found success in women’s spaces, inhabiting to some extent what historians have called the “separate sphere, “but ventured also into the public sphere as an educator, public speaker, and businesswoman.
Best remembered locally for founding Wheeler School on Providence’s East Side, she was also an internationally known artist and educator, exhibiting in the Paris Salon, receiving an honorary degree from Brown in 1911, and a medal from the French government honoring her role as an art educator. Educated in Paris, where she was (briefly) arrested as a spy during the Franco-Prussian War, she continued to evolve as an artist throughout her life.
Never married, she was an accomplished networker, gaining financial support from powerful men, and encouraging enterprising women. She was an entrepreneur, an intrepid traveler, a linguist fluent in French and German, and a neighbor of Claude Monet, the Impressionist painter, in Giverny, France. She also had a sense of fun, telling her boarding students they were too well-behaved: “I shall have no opinion of your abilities” she said, “if you can’t have a midnight spread without me knowing it.”
Miss Wheeler’s school—as it was known until the “Miss” and the apostrophe were dropped in the 1970s—dates its foundation to 1889, when she began teaching art to a handful of women and four small girls in her house on Cabot Street, Providence. Today, Wheeler School, a private, independent school, is co-ed and enrolls over 600 students from nursery-12th grade.
From Massachusetts to Europe and Back Again
Mary Wheeler was born in 1846 near Concord, Massachusetts, at the time a hotbed of Transcendentalism, woman suffrage, and educational reform. Luminaries such as Henry Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson lived nearby. Her parents were abolitionists. Their house was a stop on the Underground Railroad, and they took eleven-year-old Mary to hear John Brown speak about his anti-slavery work in Kansas. Mary was an artistic child, and May Alcott, who appeared as Amy in her sister Louise’s Little Women, became her teacher and friend.
After high school, Wheeler attended Abbot Academy in Andover, Massachusetts, for two years, where she studied art and modern languages. From 1866-70 she taught school, both in Concord and Providence. When one of her sisters married a German, Mary visited them, on the first of many visits to Europe. She perfected her German, took painting lessons, and visited galleries in Germany, Italy, and England.
Traveling with women friends, she was disappointed by cold, smoggy London, but loved Paris, apart from being “looked at by beastly men as if [I] was a cow.” She spent her days sketching in the Louvre, complaining she could only work four hours a day, as she had to have her lunch and take a nap.
She took art lessons in Paris, including drawing from the nude which horrified one of her American women friends. Mary penned a long letter to her friend Mary Noble saying it was false modesty to ignore the best way to improve her skills. “I hope confidently to teach this way in America,” she wrote defiantly.
Although she lived very frugally, she was running out of money in March 1877, but friends, particularly Canadian politician Edward Blake, whom she’d met in Rome, supported her by buying her paintings. By 1878 she’d sold $460 worth, and as she was proudly living on $7 a week, she was well-set.
After six years in Europe, she finally returned to America, delivering some of her paintings to her patron Edward Blake in Toronto on the way. She took a studio on North Main Street in Providence and soon hired local architect F. A. Sawtelle to build her a house at 26 Cabot Street, with two studios and an apartment. Former Rhode Island Governor Royal C. Taft, a wealthy art collector, helped arrange a mortgage, not an easy thing for a single woman to acquire in 1883.
Founding A School
By March 1884 she was “comfortably settled” in her new house and busy teaching twenty-three women during the week, twenty children on Saturdays, and an evening class in European history for “ladies from fifteen to sixty.”
Her reputation as a teacher was spreading. Miss Porter who was looking for a new head for her private Connecticut girls school sent out feelers, and the president of Smith College invited her to apply to teach in its art school. She ignored both.
Meanwhile, the school for young girls grew rapidly to ten in 1890 and forty-eight in 1892, five of whom were boarders. In 1893 she purchased the Froebel School on Brown Street (now part of Hillel House), to serve as a kindergarten. Mary Noble wrote, “How long before you think to annex Brown University?”
By 1894 the school offered college preparatory courses and an emphasis on foreign languages—and every student had to spend at least one hour a week in the art studio. Brown professors taught the advanced students.
Crossing a glacier in street shoes…. In 1894 she took a party of teenage girls to Europe. They spent most of their time studying art in Paris but also traveled to Switzerland where this photograph was taken.
In 1910, after purchasing three nearby houses the entrepreneurial Mary Wheeler decided she needed an entirely new school building. Not content with that, she acquired a farm in Seekonk, for sports and play, and moved the younger girls there.
Apart from the School
In 1871 she had met Mary Noble, a Chicago school teacher, and they spent the year together and conducted an epistolary friendship for the next forty-five years. A hint about her developing friendships occurs in a letter to Mary Noble asking: “Are you still of the opinion that it’s unsafe for men and women to form intimacies, one being married and the other not?” Miss Noble sent a positive “yes.”
In addition to her work as a teacher and school administrator, she was a founding member of the board of the society that developed the Women’s College at Brown (later called Pembroke and even later incorporated into Brown); board member for the Rhode Island section of the Women’s Building at the Chicago World’s Fair; and president of the Providence Alliance Française. She was a member of the Providence Art Club, the Fortnightly Club, the Headmistresses Association, and the Review Club.
Approaching war in Europe meant she no longer went to France for the summer; instead, she went to Byrdcliffe, a utopian art colony in New York’s Catskills, where she experimented with impressionism.
In January 1920 she visited her niece, and said she thought she had “ten more years of active business life ahead of me and I expect to live at least fifteen more years.” It was not to be. A few days later she slipped on an icy sidewalk and broke her leg; the wound turned septic, and in the days before antibiotics, little could be done. She died March 10, 1920, at seventy-three. She was buried in the Sleepy Hollow Cemetery in Concord, near the Thoreaus, the Hawthornes, the Emersons, and the Alcotts.
She left her school to a Board of Trustees, who still run it.
Sources:
Blanche E Wheeler Williams, Mary C. Wheeler, Leader in Art and Education. Boston: Marshall Jones, 1934.
Robert Martin, An American in Paris: Drawings of Mary Colman Wheeler, 1877-1882. The Wheeler School, 2017.
Robert Martin, Of Secrets Known in Solitude: Paintings of Mary Colman Wheeler 1882-1920. The Wheeler School, 2020.
Jane Lancaster PhD is a historian and former public school teacher (in the UK) who lives in Providence. She is an award-winning historian and has taught at RISD and Brown, and even (once) in Taiwan.
