UC Santa Barbara

My dissertation centers on Caroline Hazard (1856-1945), a member of a prominent Rhode Island family who used both her academic training and popular sentimental evocations in her works on the colonial past. Caroline Hazard’s life and work link both New England Colonial Revival and the Spanish Colonial Revival in Santa Barbara and my project offers the first biography of any kind for this influential regional activist. As resident in both places, Hazard offered extensive direction to early historic preservation projects on both coasts. She spent time as a professional historian and president of Wellesley College from 1899-1910, headed the Gilbert Stuart Memorial, and was a founding trustee, secretary, and honorary president of the Santa Barbara Natural History Museum. Hazard brought a unique combination of academic expertise, leadership roles in cultural and educational institutions, race and social status that made her both comfortable and credible enough to influence the growth of these institutions. Her performance of deferential and gracious femininity belied an ability to work forcefully to exert her will, all the while using her dedication to venerating her ancestors as a cloak for her own ambition. Hazard relied on paternalistic tropes to undergird her success, which created commonalities in colonial revival on both coasts that alike relied on the shoring up of elite power structures and racialized myths while utilizing the language of progress. Thus, this study of a professional woman of the Progressive era reveals the overlapping identities that were needed to navigate the worlds of historic preservation and culture work for a woman such as Hazard to become influential. Hazard’s words revealed both an obsession with memory and a desire to write national origin stories. This project takes up the question of why. What motivated Hazard to wrap public activism in this historical clothing? And how did her historical work operate hand in hand with her promotion of maternalist values? Hazard developed her life’s work at a time when middle- and upper-class women were seeking more public roles. Many regional activists engaged in historical writing and preservation, but few achieved the professional distinction that Hazard attained. Hazard’s life and career sheds light on the challenging relationship of women and the professions in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. She was distinctive in the way in which she expressed a conservative deference to her elite family’s vision of paternalistic capitalism, while eventually articulating a unique Christian progressivist ideology, one that viewed gendered qualities as fluid and fungible. Indeed, the way in which Hazard framed her reverence of the “eternal feminine,” which rained down benevolence upon the downtrodden and was embodied through the leadership of paternalistic colonial men that Hazard claimed as both literal and spiritual ancestors and through the work of educated, philanthropic women in Hazard’s own time, challenges previously held assumptions concerning Progressive Era feminists and their conceptions of gender. Historians such as Phoebe Kropp have linked interest in regionalism and Colonial Revival movements in various areas of the United States during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to an integration into national identity. Hazard is a notable example of this in her efforts to connect Colonial Revival movements on two coasts through identifications she made between the two to larger national themes, and she adds unique gender politics to this effort in her focus on paternalistic national origin stories making possible Hazard’s brand of maternalism in her own time. As an educator, and a professional, Hazard functioned as a progressive, fostering achievement among her students and colleagues, and advancing her educational goals within male dominated museum settings. But as her family’s daughter, Hazard’s ideology remained constrained by an inherent conservatism, which was reflected in her promotion of a romanticized vision of the elites of the colonial past.