May Lansfield Keller (28 September 1877–28 June 1964), dean of Westhampton College, was born in Baltimore, Maryland, and was the only surviving child of Wilmer Lansfield Keller, a druggist and research chemist, and Jennie Elizabeth Simonton Keller. Educated in a private school and at Girls' Latin School in Baltimore, she enrolled at age sixteen in the Woman's College of Baltimore (Goucher College after 1910) and completed her undergraduate degree in 1898. Of German heritage, Keller began her master's degree in German and English at the University of Chicago. She might have continued her studies there, but a male professor told her that if she could live without paid employment, she should marry and leave the academy. The insulting remark led Keller to enroll in the University of Berlin and later the University of Heidelberg to study Germanic languages and literature for which she received a fellowship from the Woman's College of Baltimore for 1901–1902. In 1904 she completed her doctoral dissertation, in German, which the following year was published in English as Anglo-Saxon Weapon Names Treated Archaeologically and Etymologically. Heidelberg doctorate in hand, Keller taught German at Wells College in Aurora, New York, from 1904 to 1906.
Keller taught English at the Woman's College of Baltimore from 1906 until 1914, when she was appointed dean of the new Westhampton College in Richmond, Virginia. Established as a co-ordinate institution with Richmond College, Westhampton was a Baptist-sponsored and-funded college for women that opened its doors in the autumn of 1914 with eighty-two students. Westhampton shared a 130-acre campus with the all-male Richmond College, and as the years went on increasingly shared its resources, professors, and facilities. From the beginning Westhampton offered B.A., B.S., and M.A. degrees. Keller, an accomplished academic and also a Baptist, was reportedly the first woman college dean in Virginia. Her starting salary as dean and professor of English was $1,800, including room and board. Reflecting the times, the male dean of Richmond College received a salary of $2,750.
Despite the professed support of Richmond College president Frederic William Boatwright for women's education, Keller soon clashed with Boatwright. Her advocacy for more resources, the appointment of women trustees, support for physical education and sports, and a firm assertion of Westhampton's equality with the men's college often put her at odds with both Boatwright and the college's male trustees. In May 1920 Keller threatened to resign unless she received a higher raise than the amount offered by the board. In a letter to Boatwright she observed that Westhampton's Baptist trustees "have never considered women as having a right to express an opinion of their own." In the same letter, invoking not only her own views but also those of Westhampton alumnae, she wrote, "This is one of the few institutions for women, where not one single woman has a final voice in the matters pertaining most intimately and closely to the domestic concerns of hundreds of women. That is resented by every member of the Alumnae Association and certainly was not fostered by me." Perhaps reflecting on both the Baptist hierarchy as well as the views of Boatwright, Keller complained, "I have learned that perfect honesty of opinion in Educational matters is not desired in Virginia or at Richmond College." She received her raise and withdrew her threatened resignation, and the board appointed the first women trustees.
A hallmark of Keller's long association with Westhampton was her upholding of high academic standards and an insistence on personal honesty. When appointed in 1914, Keller asked that Westhampton's entrance requirements be identical to those of the so-called Seven Sisters, the elite of Eastern women's colleges. Additionally, she was a consistent advocate for increased salaries for the women faculty members at Westhampton. Keller instituted a student government association to foster independence among the female students. Not surprisingly, Keller was a supporter of woman suffrage and in 1917 helped facilitate suffrage speakers on campus. She took steps to curb mischievous Richmond College students from coming uninvited at night onto the Westhampton campus, and she actively opposed Westhampton students serving as cheerleaders for Richmond College athletic competitions.
Soon after her arrival at Westhampton, Keller hired Fanny Graves Crenshaw, a track star and holder of multiple women's world records, to create and implement a physical education curriculum, including field hockey, swimming, basketball, tennis, archery, and track. In 1933 the college established a physical education major and in 1936 built a gymnasium. During the 1930s Keller expanded course options at Westhampton, including art and art appreciation, philosophy, applied and experimental psychology, descriptive astronomy, and dramatic arts and theatrical production. In the middle of the decade she eliminated Latin as a requirement of the B.A. degree.
A member of Phi Beta Kappa, Keller was national president of Pi Beta Phi from 1908 to 1918 and was named president emerita for life. She served two terms, from 1910 to 1914, as president of the Southern Association of College Women, was a state founder of the education honor society Delta Kappa Gamma, and was a trustee for the Collegiate School for Girls in Richmond. As a mark of appreciation for her work, Keller Hall on the Westhampton campus was named in her honor in 1946.
In 1925 Keller built the Deanery on the Westhampton campus, a red brick English-style cottage where she lived even after her retirement on 1 July 1946. Her continued residence was not without controversy. The rector of the University of Richmond (as the entity encompassing Westhampton College and Richmond College was renamed in 1920), Douglas Southall Freeman, attempted to move her from the house, maintaining that her presence would be an undue influence on the new Westhampton administration. Keller rebuffed the argument and lived in the Deanery until her death.
In her will, Keller left the Deanery to the University of Richmond. She also left income from a trust to Pauline Turnbull, a virtually lifelong companion whom Keller had recruited and hired and who since 1916 had been both registrar and a professor at Westhampton. The two lived together at the Deanery. After Keller's death, Turnbull edited and published a volume of some of Keller's extensive travel and personal letters. Throughout her life Keller visited countries in Europe as well as traveling to Canada, Mexico, Egypt, Thailand, Guam, Hawaii, and Alaska. Turnbull also included some of Keller's private letters to Robert H. Bogue, a troubled alcoholic to whom she had been engaged and who in 1912 committed suicide. Turnbull maintained that Keller kept this personal tragedy a secret all her life and that the loss of her fiancé may have been a crucial factor in her move to the deanship of Westhampton.
May Lansfield Keller died of congestive heart failure in the Deanery on 28 June 1964. She was buried in Loudon Park Cemetery in Baltimore. Once described as a "flashing-eyed, finger-jabbing little woman" by a newspaper reporter and by others as having a voice that "would snap like steel scissors," the diminutive Keller was also, upon her death, lauded for her "dynamic and scholarly leadership" as well as her "complete integrity." On the hundredth anniversary of her birth, the University of Richmond celebrated her as a courageous and revolutionary woman.
Sources Consulted:
Biographies in Virginia Iota State Organization, Delta Kappa Gamma Society International Honorary Organization for Women Educators, Adventures in Teaching, Pioneer Women Educators and Influential Teachers (1963), 59–63, portrait facing 61, Woodford B. Hackley, Faces on the Wall: Brief Sketches of the Men and Women Whose Portraits and Busts Were on the Campus of the University of Richmond in 1955 (1972), 57–58, and Pauline Turnbull, May Lansfield Keller, Life and Letters, 1877–1964 (1975), 3–59, with several portraits, 61–68; self-reported birthdate in Durward Howes, Mary L. Braun, and Rose Garvey, eds., American Women, The Standard Biographical Dictionary of Notable Women (1939), 3:475, and in passport applications, 15 Sept. 1900 and 11 June 1907, General Records of the Department of State, Record Group 59, National Archives and Records Administration, Washington, D.C.; Keller correspondence in Frederic W. Boatwright Presidential Correspondence (including first quotations in Keller to Boatwright, 31 May 1920), University of Richmond Archives, Virginia Baptist Historical Society; feature articles in Richmond Times-Dispatch, 21 Feb. 1943, 24 Aug. 1952, 28 Sept. 1962 (second quotation), 26 Apr. 1981; Richmond News Leader, 28 May 1990; Reuben E. Alley, History of the University of Richmond, 1830–1971 (1977); variant 27 Sept. 1877 birthdate in death certificate, Richmond City, Bureau of Vital Statistics, Commonwealth of Virginia Department of Health, Library of Virginia; obituary and editorial tribute in Richmond News Leader, 29 June 1964; obituary in Richmond Times-Dispatch, 29 June 1964 (third quotation); editorial tribute in Richmond Times-Dispatch, 1 July 1964 (fourth quotation).
Image courtesy of University of Richmond The Web (1922).
Written for the Dictionary of Virginia Biography by Leila Christenbury.
How to cite this page:
Leila Christenbury, May Lansfield Keller,"May Lansfield Keller (1877–1964)," Dictionary of Virginia Biography, Library of Virginia (1998– ), published 2021 (http://www.lva.virginia.gov/public/dvb/bio.asp?b=Keller_May_Lansfield, accessed [today's date]).
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