My first real contact with Wisconsin was a course at Radcliffe in my junior year. Like every Boston girl of my day I had a sound grasp of American history, luminously clear around the center of the universe, Boston and its vicinity, still firm for New York, blurring a little at Philadelphia, all but fading away below Washington, and quite nonexistent beyond Albany. But in my junior year at Radcliffe I suddenly awoke to the fact that there was a lot of America about which I knew little, and possibly it might have some relevant history beyond French and Indian wars, and the gold rush to California. Fortunately, Radcliffe did have a course on westward expansion, given, I was told, by a man who had come from "out there." My mother, who since she was a New Haven woman was not above a suspicion that a Boston education might leave one slightly provincial, readily agreed that it was about time I knew something more about my own country, but I am sure that it never occurred to her that all this would ever turn out to be anything more than an academic adventure. Of course like everybody else who ever came in touch with the giver of that course, Frederick Jackson Turner (1), I learned about the frontier. And a very exciting thing it was, for one of my, I'm afraid, rather expansive type of imagination.

Professor Turner was kindness itself, my first taste of the now familiar Wisconsin friendliness, but I am sure that his bright blue eyes must have darkened when he looked at the map question on the final examination and discovered that I, on the principle that Wisconsin was part of the old Northwest, and the Northwest wasn't as far west as you'd think it, had located Wisconsin about Nevada. At any rate I got an "A-", and was sure that it was the map question that was responsible for the minus.

After Radcliffe I taught for two years at Smith, and those two years of teaching without any supervision but only the kindly advice of older colleagues brought home to me pretty sharply the limitations of my own grasp of my hoped-for profession. When, therefore, these friends suggested that I should not only go on for graduate work, but, inasmuch as I was likely to spend my life in New England colleges, should get out and broaden my outlook by going West for a year, I was in a chastened enough mood to listen to what I thought was a pretty accurate appraisal of my limitations. My mother had no doubt about it. For years she was to wonder what I had done at Smith that they should want to send me so far away! I am sure, too, that for a decade I was my classmates' favorite example of a girl who had looked promising and then vanished beyond the horizon. My Smith friends were realistic about my prospects of staying at Wisconsin; but they assured me that it was a good place to go from.

So I came to Wisconsin in a frontier-taking spirit, and I have never quite lost my sense that Wisconsin has something of the frontier about it. Of course I realize that the old geographical frontier vanished long ago, when the ever-moving Americans reached the Pacific. But there are plenty of other frontiers that have been coming up over our horizon ever since, and one of them was in full view when I arrived at Wisconsin. Indeed, there was a real crisis here, as I may add, there has been pretty much ever since. The particular crisis of the fall of 1919 was the return of the veterans of the First World War. They were, of course, much fewer in number than the horde who were a generation later to swamp us at the end of the Second World War, but there were quite enough of them to clog up the ordinary processes of freshman English, and to make necessary the recruiting of twenty-three new instructors in all. I remember people used to look at me in a friendly way that I could see was a preparation to looking me up, but when they heard I was in the English Department, I could see the intention fade at once in their faces. There were just too many of us.

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(1) For more information on Frederick Jackson Turner, see his entry in the Wisconsin Electronic Reader.

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