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To carry out the College's
promise to have a Sargent-trained instructor, M. Carey Thomas engaged
Carolyn C. Ladd as the first "Directress of the
Gymnasium." Ladd and Thomas had met in 1873-1874, their second year
at th e
Howland School, a Quaker academy for girls in Union Springs, New York.
Ladd joined the Bryn Mawr staff shortly after graduating from Dudley Sargent's
school in Cambridge.
Throughout her years here,
Ladd often expressed her dissatisfaction with the College's--and particularly
Thomas's--attitude toward the Physical Culture Department. "What
you say about acting in a manner that is best for years to come is one
of my strongest reasons for asking now that Physical Training be represented
as a department in the faculty," she wrote  in
[date]. In the same letter, she suggests that academic excellence, one
of Thomas' most cherished goals for the College, is not the only reason
why students were coming to Bryn Mawr. The physical culture department
was "one of the greatest attractions to many people in making a choice
of institutions for their sons and daughters."
Ladd's successors were Bertha
Foster, Alice McNair, and Louisa Smith, all of whom had trained with Sargent
or one of the experts in physical education pedagogy, William Gilbert
Anderson, a Yale instructor and one of the founders of the American Association
for the Advancement of Physical Education. Like Ladd, they had to address
the growing needs of the department and Thomas's ambiguous attitude toward
the importance of the physical culture program. In a December 13, 1901
letter, Smith wrote:
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Dear Miss Thomas:
I have learned
through the students that announcement was made in Chapel on Thursday
morning, December twelve, that if they would attend the concert
to be given that afternoon they would be excised from gymnasium
drill…. That this announcement should have been made I consider
most unfortunate, and that I should be obliged to learn of it through
the students very humiliating.
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