Meta Glass (16 August 1880–20 March 1967), president of Sweet Briar College, was born in Petersburg, Virginia, and was the daughter of newspaper editor Robert Henry Glass and his second wife, Meta Sandford Glass. Edward Christian Glass, longtime superintendent of schools in Lynchburg, and Carter Glass, newspaper publisher, member of the Convention of 1901–1902, congressman, secretary of the treasury, and senator, were her elder half-brothers. She grew up in Lynchburg, where the family moved, graduated from the city's high school in 1896, and graduated from Randolph-Macon Woman's College (later Randolph College) in 1899. Like many professional women of her generation, Glass never married.
Glass taught until 1918 in a series of private schools in Virginia and one in Kentucky, in the public high school in Roanoke, and at Randolph-Macon Woman's College, where she became an associate professor of Latin. She earned a doctorate in Latin and Greek in 1913 from Columbia University, where she graduated Phi Beta Kappa. In the spring of 1918, Glass supervised a group of Randolph-Macon student volunteers who as part of the Woman's Land Army of America during World War I worked six-week shifts as "farmerettes" in neighboring Campbell County, where they grew vegetables, cared for livestock, built fences, and helped harvest wheat to support the war effort. In the summer Glass traveled to France on behalf of the YWCA and formed nurses' clubs and was dean of a school in Paris that trained European women to implement some of the YWCA's social work programs in their own countries. In 1920 the French government honored her with the Médaille de la Reconnaissance Française.
From 1920 to 1925 Glass was on the faculty at Columbia University as a lecturer and then as an assistant professor of Latin and Greek as well as an assistant to the director of extension training, helping oversee female students. She was offered the position of dean of Sweet Briar College, a private school for white women in Amherst County, Virginia, but declined. In the spring of 1925, with the retirement of President Emilie Watts McVea, the college offered Glass the presidency, and she accepted. Her initial annual salary as the third president of the college was $5,000 plus rooms on campus. In her inaugural address on 13 November, Glass expressed her strong belief in the liberal arts, the intellectual life, and her support for students from diverse backgrounds. Regarding the education of women five years after ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment, she advocated participation in student government and contended that "a pride in self-government…may be a corollary of their recently enfranchised position" and would be "an invaluable exercise of the judgment, justice, and initiative" which then could become "a laboratory for interrelations."
Glass was active and energetic during her twenty-one years as president of Sweet Briar and spearheaded a number of academic initiatives, including creating interdepartmental majors, an honors program, and a junior year of study in Scotland and France. The college enlarged the faculty, expanded the library, and added new buildings. During her presidency, which spanned the Great Depression, Sweet Briar retired its debt and increased its endowment from approximately $133,000 to almost $1,000,000. Glass was also able to keep the faculty intact and their salaries constant during the Depression.
Contemporary and later accounts of Sweet Briar history indicate that Glass had a warm and consistent relationship with both faculty and students. She had poise and decisiveness but was not unapproachable. People appreciated her humor and, on occasion, sense of fun. In public appearances and speeches she occasionally exhibited a controlled but unmistakable emotion, revealing, for many of her hearers, a different aspect of her formidable intellect. Characterized in one news article as "peppery" and a "happy extrovert," Glass was known for her intelligence, energy, and personal magnetism.
During her presidency Glass traveled extensively and delivered dozens of speeches to local, regional, and national school and civic organizations on topics as varied as the liberal arts, higher education, the challenges of the wartime economy, post-war education, changing trends as they affected women, women's employment, and women's place in society. Her speeches reveal a decidedly progressive, feminist bent. In her talk, "How Can A Woman Stay in Her Place?" Glass ridiculed the question by coolly observing that while "society has seemed content to let men be in any old place," for a woman it was "highly important that she stay" in the place society had dictated. In another speech on modern trends and women, Glass argued, "A chance to function as a whole human being, a chance to contribute to the use of society and the enjoyment of mankind what one has in her, to be hindered by no arbitrary and extraneous taboo, to have level-eyed recognition and reward for accomplishment, this seems to me a worthy goal for women to seek."
While Glass was president of Sweet Briar, her industry and energy brought increased visibility to the college, and she received eight honorary doctorates from a variety of universities, including Columbia, Mount Holyoke, Brown, Williams, and the University of North Carolina. She served two terms as president of the American Association of University Women (1933–1937), and one term as president of the Association of American Colleges (1939–1940), and in leadership positions in numerous other academic, educational, and humanitarian organizations. During World War II she was a member of the National Committee on Education and Defense and served on the advisory council that organized the United States Navy's women's auxiliary, Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service (known generally as the WAVES). By the time Glass retired as president of Sweet Briar, effective 1 July 1946, the Virginia Chamber of Commerce's magazine, Commonwealth, declared that she was "a recognized leader in national and international educational circles." The college named her president emeritus and in 1962 dedicated the new Meta Glass residence hall on the Sweet Briar campus. The American Association of University Women named an endowment in her honor.
In retirement, Glass maintained her busy schedule. In 1947 President Harry Truman appointed her to the federal government's Loyalty Review Board; she was the only woman member. Glass was active in supporting progressive Democratic candidates in Virginia. During the 1950s she continued her work on the board of the American Association of University Women and the board of overseers of Sweet Briar College. She traveled, occasionally with niece Margaret S. Banister, a Sweet Briar alumna and college employee. Helping out an administrative colleague who had fallen ill, Glass was for a short time the head of Stuart Hall, a private girls' school in Staunton.
Meta Glass died of pneumonia in a Charlottesville nursing home on 20 March 1967, and was buried in Springhill Cemetery, in Lynchburg. She left the bulk of her estate to Banister and on her death to Sweet Briar. The state's newspapers lauded Glass as "a woman of fierce determination, dedication and high principle" and as "one of the foremost Virginians of her generation."
Sources Consulted:
Biography in National Cyclopedia of American Biography, 53:418–419 (portrait); self-reported birth date and birthplace in passport application, 2 July 1918, General Records of the Department of State, Record Group 59, National Archives and Records Administration, Washington, D.C; feature articles in Commonwealth 3 (Apr. 1936): 17–18, 12 (Dec. 1945): 17–18 (sixth quotation), and Richmond Times-Dispatch, 27 Jan. 1946 (third quotation), 23 Sept. 1951; Dr. Meta Glass Papers, Sweet Briar College, Amherst, Va., including Glass, "How Can a Woman Stay in Her Place," unpublished typescript (fourth quotation) and Glass, "Address for the Twentieth Century Club of Washington, D.C., November 1, 1934," unpublished typescript (fifth quotation); Richmond Times-Dispatch, 28 July 1918 (first quotation); Glass, "Acceptance of the Office" in "The Inauguration of Meta Glass as President of the College," Sweet Briar College Bulletin 9 (Nov. 1925): 22–32 (second quotation on 30–31); Martha Lou Lemmon Stohlman, The Story of Sweet Briar College (1956); Death Certificate, Charlottesville, Bureau of Vital Statistics, Virginia Department of Health; obituaries in Lynchburg Daily Advance and Richmond Times-Dispatch, both 21 Mar. 1967; editorial tributes in Lynchburg Daily Advance (seventh quotation) and Richmond Times-Dispatch (eighth quotation), both 23 Mar. 1967; memorial in Randolph-Macon Alumnae Bulletin 60 (spring 1967): 24; memorials and tributes in Sweet Briar College Alumnae Magazine 37 (spring 1967): 2–12.
Image courtesy of Mary Helen Cochran Library, Sweet Briar College.
Written for the Dictionary of Virginia Biography by Leila Christenbury.
How to cite this page:
Leila Christenbury, "Meta Glass (1880–1967)," Dictionary of Virginia Biography, Library of Virginia (1998– ), published 2020 (http://www.lva.virginia.gov/public/dvb/bio.php?b=Glass_Meta, accessed [today's date]).
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