Lesson Relearned: The life of Mary Elizabeth George

Lessons Relearned: The life of Mary Elizabeth George

BY Trey Smallwood

Tour Guide through Georgetown Time

Welcome to the newest edition of the Back Page. I believe that it is a Back Page tradition to set up what the topic/ theme is going to be for the semester. To set up what I am doing this semester let me take you down memory lane (pun intended).

In past editions, Back Page Editors have taken a variety of approaches. Editors have done everything from funny lists and comics to investigative journalism and a full semester examination on love to political discourses.

While those seem like a diverse group of ideas, they did not differ so much in their purpose but in their style of delivery. Every back page was written in order to teach the readers of the Georgetonian a lesson.

When I began to think about what I wanted to teach, and especially how I wanted to deliver it, I was stumped. The Georgetonian has a back room. It holds old archives of newspapers but, it also holds odds and ends that the school has decided to store in there over the decades. While I was looking at old copies of the newspaper I remembered something else that is stored in the room: former student record cards.

These former student record cards are all around the backroom. There are probably thousands of them. As I began to look through them I remembered a Colleen Atwood quote: “Inspiration comes from everywhere: books, art, people on the street.”

While I am not drawing my inspiration from books, art or people on the street necessarily, I am using written records of ordinary people at Georgetown College to maybe teach a lesson to all of us, to try to show our connections with alumnus of the past and to definitely write a worthwhile backpage. While some topics might be heavy, I hope to also celebrate these individuals’ lives and at least sometimes keep it upbeat.

These former student records can tell us a variety of information of the individuals. Listed on the card is their full name, when they graduated, their spouses, their children, if their children went to Georgetown, any organizations they were involved in, any pieces of information that makes them important, books or articles that they have published, that they are deceased, and sometimes, how they died.

The person I am featuring in this issue is Mary Elizabeth George and honestly, at first glance I almost went right past her card. Her student record card is very plain. She graduated in 1886 and her degree was conferred in 1905. Shortly after she graduated in 1886, she married H. P. Vories on Jan. 20, 1890. She had three children: Ruth Vories, Katherine Vories and Edwina Davis Vories who married another Georgetown College student with the last name of Randolph-Macon.

We learn a lot more about her when we flip the card over. Besides the fact that she moved to Colorado, we learn two more important facts about her. The first being that she was a “ward of Dr. Rucker.”

If you have not had the chance to take a class in the history department and do not know what it means to be a “ward” of someone, it means to be

in their care. It can be compared to a modern day guardian. Dr. Rucker was essentially Mary’s legal guardian.

I am sure that the name Rucker sounds familiar to you. Whether you live in Rucker Village or walk past the entrance to South Campus that still says Rucker Hall, this name is known to our student body.

Dr. Rucker led the effort to integrate women into Georgetown College’s student body, beginning in 1889 and ending in 1893, when the first woman graduated with men. The first women’s dormitory, completed in 1895, was named in honor of his efforts. Rucker also supervised the construction of a building that housed the chapel, library, gymnasium, museum and literary society meeting rooms.

It is important to note that Dr. Rucker was the individual who lead the charge to integrate women into Georgetown College because the second important fact that we learn about Mary is that she was “the first young lady to go thru the college after it became co-educationalized.”

While this is all the information I could find on her, including research outside of the cards, there’s definitely lessons that we can learn from Mary and Dr. Rucker.

While I will be featuring more of Dr. Rucker’s life in a later issue, we can still learn something from his relationship with Mary. One part of it is that you do not have to be related to some one to go to battle for them. While Mary was not his biological daughter, he still worked to make Georgetown co-educationalized. You can be an advocate for anyone and any issue. Even if it does not affect you personally.

From Mary we learn that we all have a personal connection to gender discrimination of the time. When you began this article you may not have personally known anyone who was discriminated against during this time.

One form of discrimination she faced was simply how individuals viewed her. For example, I told you she was in the “ward” of Dr. Rucker. She was in his care. Although we do not know where her traditional family was, we can see that even as a college student she was not viewed as someone who could be independent. Furthermore, she was not described as a “student” as other former student record cards said, she was called “young lady.” It can be easily discerned that as the first female student when the college was co-educationalized, she was viewed as a “young lady” and not a “student.”

I also mentioned early on that she graduated in 1886 but her degree was not conferred (or officially given to her) until 1905, nearly two decades later. While I could not find anything in her or Georgetown’s history as to why this happened, one possibility is because she was just a “young lady.” While I hope this was not the reason, if it was it goes to show how perseverance through adversity and discrimination can pay off.

She officially got her degree after some years and she made an impact on our college and our lives, so much so that she is being written about more than 130 years after she graduated.