Letters to the editor

Wellesley welcomes short letters (300 words maximum) relating to articles or items that have appeared in recent issues of the magazine. Send your remarks to the Editor, Wellesley magazine, 106 Central St., Wellesley, MA 02481-8203, or email your comments to magazine@wellesley.edu.

Celebrating 150

What a wonderful list (“150,” fall 2025)! To your fact No. 54 about poets, I’d like to add Philip Booth, from whom I took a poetry course in the early 1960s. He was teaching at the same time as David Ferry, whose course I also took. What riches!

Kathy Taylor Isaacs ’62, Pasadena, Md.

While reading the fall issue of the magazine, “Celebrating 150 Years of Making a Difference,” I read one of the alumnae stories and was surprised that I was mentioned! I was attending my 55th reunion in 2023 and was staying in Stone-Davis. [Johanna Lee ’26 wrote in a “Wellesley in 150” piece: “My first-year summer, a purple lanyard hanging around my neck, I worked reunion. Next to our makeshift table in the lobby was a foldable chair where ’68ers would wait for their friends to peer through the window on the green Stone-D door. As the days passed by, more ’68ers stopped by, and our table started to fill with new collections from them. … A yellow Post-It where I jotted down Dr. Wan Lim’s message on connecting with on-campus Asian clubs, to be delivered to Slater.”]

When I arrived from Penang, Malaysia, to Wellesley in 1964, I was one of only 10 “foreign” students. There were 40 of us in the whole College, and we had our own dean, Ms. Frisch. Each of us had a host family and we were expected to go out to the community as “ambassadors.” I went to church groups and Rotary Club meetings, and I was involved with a local Girl Scout group. The most memorable event was meeting with Wellesley alumna Mayling Soong Chiang, class of 1917, wife of Chiang Kai-shek. The international student population has certainly grown!

Wellesley instilled in us the culture of volunteerism and to make a difference wherever we are. I have tried to live up to Wellesley’s motto. I started a program at the University of Cincinnati College of Medicine called UC Med Mentors (mentoring underserved K–12 students), which is still going strong after more than 20 years. I am a retired emerita professor living in New Jersey.

Wan Lim ’68, Lawrence Township, N.J.

The Impact of Suffs

Elisabeth “Betsy” Griffith ’69 and I are not only Wellesley grads. We are also historians of the American suffrage movement, along with Lynn Sherr ’63 and Francille Wilson ’69. I write to respectfully disagree with Betsy’s critical commentary about the musical Suffs (“A Historian Faces the Music,” summer 2025). She challenges some of its historical inaccuracies, particularly about the relationship between the moderate Carrie Chapman Catt and the radical Alice Paul. … I have just [written] a big biography of the 19th-century leader Elizabeth Cady Stanton, whose lifelong bond with Susan B. Anthony also has its distinct partisans, including me!

I came to Suffs with the same nervous anticipation as Betsy about its historical accuracy. But I soon got swept up in its energy and excitement, and above all in its ability to convey the courage and determination of its characters. The history that historians research and write and the novels, plays, movies, and musicals derived from our work make distinct contributions. The goal of these other genres is more to capture the emotional and dramatic essence of our subjects than to get the details exactly right. … We need all ways of rendering history—especially now when the full grandeur and complexity of our national path to democracy is so imperiled. I agree with Betsy in admiring Suffs’ determination to show the role of Black as well as white women in winning the vote—even though it took them a half century more to fully realize it. The intensity and dynamism of the Paul/Catt relationship—full of disagreement and conflict even as they fought in different ways for the same goal—is similarly crucial to Suffs’ story, is equally truthful in substance if not in details, and carries the same message: A very big tent was necessary to win American women the vote.

Ellen Carol DuBois ’68, Los Angeles

Editor’s note: Ellen's new book, Elizabeth Cady Stanton: A Revolutionary Life, will be published in March.