This week I chose my research topic: the Chinese Scholarship at Bryn Mawr, which awarded a full scholarship to one foreign Chinese student per year. When I first found out about the existence of the Chinese Scholarship from Offerings to Athena, I was surprised because I was aware that she had made a speech to the student body articulating her eugenicist and white supremacist beliefs. I wondered at the contradiction between her white supremacist beliefs and her support for foreign Chinese, inviting them to learn here in stark contrast with her hostility toward African-American and Jewish students. Upon actually reading the speech in full, I was struck by how much racism pervaded every aspect of her beliefs. Even Quaker pacifism had a racial justification: War kills off a generation’s best people, causing the degeneration of the gene pool. 

However, she also mentioned positive views about China, showing disdain toward Chinese culture but not Chinese people. Saying that “an unchanging tradition of inconceivably difficult and preposterous learning has kept an extraordinarily intellectually gifted people shackled and stationary while the world of intellect has passed it by,” she seemed to imply optimism that Chinese people were capable of equalling Westerners if they were exposed to the right education. 

Later in the speech, she decries the “headlong intermixture of races” and the wave of southern European immigration to the U.S. At this point in time, the Chinese Exclusion Act had already been in place for many years, so it makes sense that she would not have mentioned Chinese immigration or felt threatened by it. Still, I would be curious about her views on Chinese immigration and whether she would have deemed Chinese an appropriate race to settle in America, much like the “singularly gifted even if politically unsuccessful Irish and Welsh.”