Born in Baltimore on January 2, 1857, Carey Thomas, as she preferred from her college days to be known, was the daughter of a modestly prosperous Quaker family. She early developed a taste for reading, a dedication to women╒s rights, and an imperious will. She attended Quaker schools in Baltimore and in Ithaca, New York, then overrode her father╒s objections and sought a college education. Two years after entering as a junior, she graduated from Cornell University in 1877. She spent a year at The Johns Hopkins University, where she studied privately under Professor Basil L. Gildersleeve because she was not allowed to attend classes, and then traveled to Europe to work on a doctorate in linguistics.
After three years at the University of Leipzig she was refused a degree because she was a woman; she then applied to Zurich, was accepted for examination, and received her Ph.D. summa cum laude in 1882. After a year of further work at the Sorbonne in Paris she returned to the United States and in 1884 was appointed professor of English at and dean of the newly established Bryn Mawr College for women, which opened in 1885. She was the first woman college faculty member in the country to hold the title ╥dean.╙
At Bryn Mawr Thomas quickly established herself as a leading and soon the dominant influence. She largely organized the undergraduate studies program and started the first graduate program at any women╒s school. In 1885 she joined her long-time friend Mary Garrett and others in founding the Bryn Mawr School for Girls in Baltimore, and in 1889 the same group organized a major fund-raising campaign that helped persuade the Johns Hopkins faculty to open its new medical school to women. She also established scholarships for European students to study at Bryn Mawr, the first such graduate scholarships in the United States. She progressively reduced her teaching work at Bryn Mawr in favor of administration, and by 1892 she had virtually supplanted President James E. Rhoads. In 1894, with the trustees swayed in part by Mary Garrett╒s promise of financial support, Carey Thomas was chosen to succeed the retiring Rhoads. She continued as dean until 1908 and as president until 1922.
During that time Thomas stoutly maintained the high academic standards she had originally established for Bryn Mawr, standards unsurpassed by any men╒s college in America. Intellectual rigor and her own lifelong distaste for dilettantism shaped the curriculum of the college. She championed the cause of woman suffrage and worked for the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment to the Constitution, serving as president of the National College Women╒s Equal Suffrage League from 1908 to 1913. She was a founder in 1900 of the Association to Promote Scientific Research by Women and of the International Federation of University Women, and in 1921 she established the Summer School for Women Workers in Industry. After her retirement from Bryn Mawr in 1922 she traveled widely and luxuriously on her large inheritance from Mary Garrett. She died at her home in Philadelphia on December 2, 1935.
