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Marjorie Nicolson’s introduction as one of three pledges (new members) of the Chi Omega chapter at the University of Michigan noted that “on the afternoon of June 3, we gave a sewing party, and June 4 we entertained at dinner.”
Nicolson was born on February 18, 1894. She was living in Detroit when she chose to attend the University of Michigan. She earned her B.A. in 1914; a master’s degree from Michigan was conferred in 1918.
In an oral history, Nicolson stated that she lived in the Chi Omega house because there were no university dormitories for women. She was a member of a committee to study rush (recruitment) rules. The Alpha Phi Quarterly reported on the committee and its scope, “In general the new rules aim at three larger considerations – the abolition of pledging any but regularly enrolled collegians (and this in spite of our unexpired dispensation from the N.P.C.!), better scholarship and restricted rushing.”
Eleusis, February 1920
She earned a Ph.D. from Yale University in 1920. Nicolson was the first woman to be awarded the $500 John Addison Porter Prize for her dissertation.
She returned to Ann Arbor, where she was an assistant professor at the University of Michigan. From 1923-1926, she studied at Johns Hopkins University while teaching at Goucher College. Nicolson studied in England for a short time as one of the early Guggenheim fellows.
Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts, employed her from 1926-1941. She started her association with Smith as an associate professor and became a full professor in 1929. She also served as Dean. While at Smith she was president of Phi Beta Kappa’s national association, the first woman to hold that position. She also served in that capacity several times.
In the 1930s, she was on the committee to find America’s most notable woman who would be awarded the Chi Omega National Achievement Award.
Cincinnati Enquirer, October 12, 1931
When she left Smith for Columbia University, she became the chair of the English and Comparative Literature department. She was one of the earliest, if not the first, woman to hold a full professorship at a renowned graduate school. Nicolson became a member of the American Philosophical Society in 1941.
She served as interim editor of Phi Beta Kappa’s literary journal, The American Scholar, in 1943. In 1954, she received Columbia’s Bicentennial Silver Medallion. Nicolson was named a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1955. When she departed from Columbia in 1962, she held the title Peter Field Trent Professor Emeritus.
The following year she was on the west coast at the Claremont Graduate School as the Francis Bacon Chair. That year, 1963, she was president of the Modern Language Association. The following year she returned to the east coast and was a visiting scholar at Princeton’s National Institute for Advanced Study. In 1967, she became the first female to be awarded Yale University’s Wilbur Cross Medal for Alumni Achievement.
She died in White Plains, New York on March 9, 1981. She is buried in Northampton, Massachusetts, and her papers are housed at Smith College.
