Last week Ancestry.com posted a new collection of yearbooks from American universities.
Searching new collections like this one is often a disappointment, since broad-based collections covering multiple years, multiple publications, multiple institutions! are rarely as broad as they say they are. Companies like ancestry.com open the collections for searching as soon as they feel they’ve gained some level of critical mass, but completeness is seldom a criterion. So searching the collections often leads to no hits, even if the collection claims to “cover” the information you seek. An inexperienced researcher might conclude that the information does not, in fact, exist. Opening collections early isn’t a bad thing. It’s just that searchers have to know to come back regularly and often to repeat the same searches over and over, in order to find new information as it is added.
All complaining aside, I searched the database for a number of family names. Only one search was successful, but it was a great find! My search for Evelyn Clift turned up a hit in the 1923 MIT Technique Yearbook. She was a graduate member of a club? sorority? of women students called Cleofan.
The word “cleofan” is an Old English verb, from which our verb “to cleave” is derived. Cleave means to separate or split, and the Old English "cleofan" carried the same meaning. So this group of women students intended to separate themselves from the men on campus into their own club, which would presumably focus on their own unique issues and experiences. The modern verb “cleave to” also means to hold fast together, so the women who founded the group may also have intended the group to provide common support to all the women on campus. What a perfect name for a group of women students in a men’s university!
From what I can gather from various web resources, the Cleofan club at MIT was founded sometime in the late 1880s by the very few women students who were allowed to attend MIT at that time. By 1923, the membership included 26 undergraduate women and 23 graduates. Grandma Mac's name appeared among the graduate students.
It is likely that the Cleofan membership, however small, included most of the women at MIT that year. In 1922, in her submittal to the Mount Holyoke Class of 1919 class letter, Evelyn wrote, “I am still with the Physics Department of M.I.T. as a lab assistant. The experiences in such an environment are valuable – perhaps. Ask anyone who has been a co-ed. However Tech is not seriously a coeducational institution, with two thousand men as over against forty girls.”
A wonderful picture of Evelyn among her graduate student counterparts (nearly all men) appears here.
