To her parents, tuned to the high-society mores of the day, Theodate was doubtless a chore. At nineteen she changed her birth name, Effie, to Theodate, her grandmother’s name, out of respect for the woman’s devout belief in the Quaker principle of emphasizing the spiritual over the material. She had little interest in “coming out” as a debutante, and none in marriage, which she perceived to be a wall that foreclosed any future ambitions she might have. She called it the “gold collar.” Her parents sent her to a private school in Farmington, Miss Porter’s School for Young Ladies, expecting that once her education was completed she would return to take her place among Cleveland’s upper crust. Theodate liked Farmington so much, however, that she decided to stay. She became a suffragist; at one point she also joined the Socialist Party, and she loved riling her father with her talk of socialism.
On a lengthy journey through Europe in 1888, when she was twenty-one, she grew closer to her father. He was devoted to travel and to collecting art and was among the first collectors to fully embrace the impressionists, at a time when their work was widely deemed eccentric, even radical. It was he who suggested she consider architecture as a profession. They spent time together scouring art galleries and artists’ studios for works to bring back to Cleveland; they bought two paintings by Claude Monet. Theodate sketched elements of structures she found appealing, a pilaster here, a chimney there. She had little interest in Paris, which she described as “the greatest blot on the face of the earth,” but she adored England, in particular its cozy country homes with sagging roofs, half-timbered walls, and welcoming doorways. She drew sketches of her vision of the ideal farmhouse.
Architecture being a field then largely barred to women, Theodate created an architectural education for herself, first through private studies with members of Princeton University’s art department. With her father’s support she bought a house in Farmington with 42 acres. Her parents, at her urging, resolved to retire to Farmington and build a house that would showcase Alfred’s art collection, which, in addition to the two Monets, included works by Whistler and Degas. Her father suggested she design the house, under the supervision of a practicing architect. She chose the firm of McKim, Mead & White, which, no doubt because of Alfred’s wealth, agreed to the plan. Theodate’s subsequent letter to founding partner William Rutherford Mead revealed her to be a woman of strong if not imperious character. She wrote, “As it is my plan, I expect to decide in all the details as well as all more important questions of plan that may arise.… In other words, it will be a Pope house instead of a McKim, Mead and White.”
The design and construction of the house became for Theodate an architectural apprenticeship. But the project, completed in 1900, exhausted her. That fall she wrote in her diary, “I have wrung my soul dry … over father’s house.”
By 1910 she was a full-fledged architect, soon to become the first female architect licensed in Connecticut. Three years later, in August 1913, her father died of a cerebral hemorrhage. It was a shattering blow, and in her grief she resolved to build a preparatory school for boys in his memory—a school, however, that would be very different from any then in existence. She envisioned a campus structured to mimic a small New England town, with shops, town hall, post office, and a working farm. Her plan was to emphasize the building of character by requiring that students devote a significant portion of their days to “community service,” helping out on the farm and in the shops, where they would learn such arts as carpentry and printmaking. In this she was very much in step with the Arts and Crafts movement, then in full sway, which held that craftsmanship provided both satisfaction and rescue from the perceived dehumanization of the industrial revolution. By 1910 the movement had swept America, yielding collectives, like fellow passenger Elbert Hubbard’s Roycrofters, and a new and simple approach to design, evident in the furniture of Gustav Stickley and in the simple, well-made homes of the so-called Craftsman style. It inspired as well the founding of magazines like House Beautiful and Ladies’ Home Journal.
By Saturday morning, May 1, 1915, Theodate was again in the grip of a profound weariness. The past winter had been difficult, professionally and emotionally. One incident in particular underscored the challenge of being a woman in a male profession: a publisher, thinking the name Theodate was a man’s, asked to include her photograph in a book on leading architects in New York. Upon learning in a phone call that she was female, he withdrew the offer. She also suffered one of her periodic descents into depression, this one sufficiently severe that she needed the assistance of a home nurse. In February 1915, she wrote, “I am having such persistent insomnia that my nights are waking nightmares.”
She believed, however, in the regenerative power of setting off on a journey. “There is nothing like the diversion of travel for one who is mentally fagged.”
Once aboard the Lusitania, Theodate was led by a steward to her cabin, a stateroom on D Deck on the starboard side. She deposited her hand luggage and made sure her cabin bags had arrived. If she hoped to sleep well that night, she was soon to be disappointed.