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Ada Comstock as a young girl. Images courtesy of University Archives.

By Tim Brady

In November 1940, Ada Louise Comstock, president of Radcliffe College, returned to the University of Minnesota for the dedication of the second women’s dormitory ever to be built on campus. Named in her honor, Comstock Hall opened its doors three decades after the inaugural women’s residence, Sanford Hall, had been constructed with the guidance and support of the then-dean of women students at the University of Minnesota: Comstock herself.

It was only fitting that Comstock be chosen for the honor. Few American women in the first half of the 20th century had such a distinguished career in academic administration, few past female students of the University of Minnesota had a more successful professional life than this native of Moorhead, and no early administrator at the U did more than Comstock to strengthen the state of women at the U and to secure for them a place—both in a literal and figurative sense—on the campus of the University of Minnesota.

The campus had changed in her absence. The student body had grown significantly, and so had the number of young women at the U. Twenty-four years old when she began teaching at Minnesota, Comstock would later describe herself as “hardly older than the students.” She was tall and good-humored and had a self-confidence boosted by dint of the fact that she was the apple of her father’s eye. “My father thought I was perfect from the day I was born,” Comstock would later tell a researcher. “My mother had no such illusions.”

Ada Comstock arrived at the U of M in 1892 as a bright 16-year-old freshman, the daughter of a successful lawyer and politician from the western prairies (Solomon G. Comstock served many years in the state legislature and one term in the U.S. Congress). She roomed with the family of an old friend of her father’s, Dean William Pattee of the Law School, and spent two years on the campus before moving on to Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts, where she earned a bachelor’s degree in 1897.

Comstock came back to Minnesota after graduation to earn another diploma—a teaching certificate from Moorhead Normal—before returning to the east in 1898. At Columbia University now, Comstock took a master’s in English history and education, after which she headed once more to Minnesota, this time to assume her first academic position: teaching English composition at the University of Minnesota under the watchful eye of the chair of the Department of Rhetoric, the venerable Maria Sanford.

As a young instructor, Comstock entertained a number of suitors—none of whom won her hand—and chafed at the occasionally overbearing presence of the department chair, Miss Sanford.

She taught five classes a day, and aside from the duties incumbent with those labors, quickly became an advocate for the wants and needs of the female students at the U. The most pressing of these was for space that women on campus could call their own.

In the early days of the University, when female students numbered in the dozens, a lounge had been set aside for their use in Old Main. By the turn of the century, when the number of women on campus were in the hundreds, that one room remained the only meeting area on campus that was exclusively theirs.

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Ada Comstock, far left, with friends as a teen.

Women’s League formed at the U soon after Comstock’s return to Minneapolis, with the expressed goal of trying to create a meeting place for women at the U—one that would, in Comstock’s words, “bring women students together in freer companionship.” When Old Main burned in 1904, the need for this new facility turned even more urgent.

Ada Comstock soon became instrumental to league efforts, particularly in lobbying the president of the U, Cyrus Northrop, to steer funds donated by Thomas Shevlin away from the construction of a chemistry building and toward the making of a women’s center. Her efforts were successful, and in 1906 ground was broken for Shevlin Hall, which soon became the place on campus for women to dine, socialize, study, and meet.

Comstock’s obvious gifts for advocacy on behalf of the female students of the University subsequently led to her appointment as the first dean of women at the U, in 1907. This was not only a new role at the University but in higher education across the country. Just a handful of deans of women existed at state universities, and Ada Comstock quickly took on a leadership role in a national organization that formed among them.

She also set her sights toward a next great quest for the women of Minnesota: a dormitory. At the time Comstock became the dean of women, there were more than 1,000 female students at the U and the majority of them lived in Minneapolis boarding homes. While many male students also lived in area boarding houses, young, Victorian-age women put their reputations, if not their well-being, at risk for doing the same thing. There were a few sorority houses near campus as well, but Comstock was not a big fan of these (“Unless carefully regulated they often become such centers of gaiety as to be dangerous to the health and scholarship of those who live in them”). Simply put, the off-campus circumstances of women at the University were not, in her opinion, conducive to promoting collegial life. “A woman student at the University might live in complete isolation, gleaning from the college life only the benefits of the class-room,” wrote Comstock, “or she might, if she were unfortunate in her choice of lodging house, suffer an absolute loss in refinement and in standards of behavior.”

Again, Comstock’s lobbying efforts, both at the University and now at the state legislature, were crucial for the creation of the U’s first dormitory. In 1909, the state appropriated $100,000 for the construction of Sanford Hall and building began that very year. (Pioneer Hall, the first dorm for male students, was built in 1930.) The executive board of the all-female Student Government Association of the University of Minnesota—another innovation fostered by Comstock—expressed its thanks to Ada Louise Comstock through The Shevlin Record: “We are to have a girl’s dormitory at Minnesota,” the paper announced. “For her untiring work in procuring it, we as a board, which represents the girls whom it will benefit, thank Miss Comstock. We appreciate her friendship, her kindly assistance and advice during the year that is past.”

Comstock continued to work on their behalf, finding scholarship funding for some students to help defray the costs of living in the dormitory, and pushing for the construction of a women’s gymnasium to help meet the health and recreation needs of her students.

In this second goal, she was not successful. Nor was she able to convince some male members of the community to take seriously the goals and aspirations of the female students of the University of Minnesota. At that 1940 dedication ceremony, Comstock gave a speech in which she recalled her early days at the U. It was a time when “the effort of women for higher education

Ada Comstock married late in life, to Yale emeritus professor Wallace Notestein.

was still regarded as more or less a humorous thing, and occasion for jokes.” She recalled visiting the editor-in-chief of one of the Minneapolis papers “to beg him sometimes to refer to women of the University of Minnesota by another term than coeds; and to write about their activities in a vein which was not facetious. He laughed at me, I remember; and I haven’t any recollection that my plea was ever seriously considered.”

By 1912, her last year at the U, Ada Comstock had earned a stellar reputation, not just at the University but in academic circles around the United States. When her alma mater, Smith College, came calling, wanting to appoint her to its own brand-new deanship, she couldn’t resist. Despite the entreaties of the new president at Minnesota, George Vincent, Comstock decided to head east, mainly because “she always loved taking a new job . . . and building it.”

She would work at Smith for the next nine years, including one in which she served as the college’s unofficial acting president—the trustees refused to grant her the official title because of her gender. Perhaps not surprisingly under these circumstances, she moved to Radcliffe in 1923, to become president of that college, a post she would hold for the next 20 years. Here again, Comstock’s talents for negotiation and administration were instrumental. She was able to secure for Radcliffe its status as a sister school to a reluctant Harvard; at the same time, she promoted Radcliffe’s standing as an independent women’s college, by expanding the graduate program and launching a nationwide admissions program.

In addition to her academic work, Comstock was elected the first president of the American Association of University Women in 1921; she was the only woman selected to serve on the National Commission of Law Observance and Enforcement (known as the Wickersham Commission), where, among other duties, she counseled for a repeal of the Eighteenth Amendment, which had established prohibition; and she was a vice chair of the Institute of Pacific Relations, an organization for which she reported on the Manchurian crisis of the 1930s, in the wake of the Japanese invasion of that country.

When Comstock retired from Radcliffe in 1943, at the age of 67, she surprised almost everyone who knew her by marrying an old friend whom she’d first met at the University of Minnesota more than 30 years earlier. Wallace Notestein had been a young instructor in history at the U of M when they first courted. He was an emeritus professor at Yale when he and Ada were finally married. They lived out the remaining years of their lives together in New Haven.

After Comstock died in 1973 at the age of 97, she was honored by Smith College in the form of the Ada Comstock Scholars Program, a prestigious program which helps fund nontraditional students at Smith. At the University of Minnesota, Comstock Hall remains as a reminder of Ada Comstock’s work on this campus and elsewhere.

In addition, this past fall, the University of Minnesota instituted the Ada Comstock Distinguished Lecture Series. These free lectures, held twice a year, will honor the exceptional research, scholarship, and leadership of female University of Minnesota faculty by featuring the work of these distinguished professors through their own words.

Ada Comstock would no doubt approve.

Tim Brady is a St. Paul–based freelance writer.