page_title: Bryn Mawr College Deanery
section_title: M. Carey Thomas, resident
hierarchical_section_title: Bryn Mawr College Deanery / M. Carey Thomas, resident
caption_attribution_description: Photo of M. Carey Thomas standing on the deanery porch and addressing students.
context_page_description: The Bryn Mawr College Deanery was the campus residence of the first Dean and second President of Bryn Mawr College, Martha Carey Thomas, who maintained a home there from 1885 to 1933. Under the direction of Thomas, the Deanery was greatly enlarged and lavishly decorated for entertaining the college's important guests, students, and alumnae, as well as Thomas’ own immediate family and friends.
  From its origins as a modest five room Victorian cottage, the Deanery grew into a sprawling forty-six room mansion which included design features from several notable 19th and 20th century artists. The interior was elaborately decorated with the assistance of the American artist Lockwood de Forest and Louis Comfort Tiffany, de Forest's partner in the design firm Tiffany & de Forest, supplied a number of light fixtures of Tiffany glass. De Forest's design of the Deanery's so-called 'Blue Room' is particularly important as it is often considered one of the best American examples of an Aesthetic Movement interior, alongside the Peacock Room by James Abbott McNeill Whistler.
context_section_description: After she was appointed Dean and Professor of English, M. Carey Thomas took up residence at Bryn Mawr College in 1885 in the small five-room house which would become known as the "Deanery." She had earned her undergraduate degree from Sage College, the women's school at Cornell University, and a Ph.D. in linguistics from the University of Zurich at a time when women's opportunities in higher education were quite restricted.  An advocate for women's education, Thomas played an active role in the planning of the college's organization and academic curriculum.  In 1894, she was elected its second president,  a position which she held until her retirement in 1922. In her forty-eight years at Bryn Mawr College Thomas continued to maintain a home in the Deanery, overseeing several expansions and renovations, as well as decorating the interior with items collected from her international travels.  In 1933, she arranged for the Deanery and its furnishings to be turned over to the college for use as an alumnae house. She died two years later at the age of seventy-eight.
caption: M. Carey Thomas standing on the Deanery veranda and addressing students, 1905
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