This photograph from the Special Collections Library shows Fred A. Knapp, Class of 1896, and Emily B. Cornish, Class of 1895, in Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, staged at Bates in November 1893.

We assume that Knapp and Cornish played the lead characters, Orsino and Viola, in Shakespeare’s gender-bending comedy of mistaken identity.

[Recently, Matteo Pangallo '03 , in the Ph.D. program in English at the Massachusetts Center for Renaissance Studies, pointed out that the identical costuming in the photograph clearly suggests that Knapp and Cornish were playing the separated twins, Sebastian and Viola, and not Duke Orsino and Viola.]

The fall of 1893 saw another gendered story play out at Bates. For the first time since the school’s founding in 1855, the “young ladies of the freshman class at Bates outnumber the young men,” The Bates Student reported.

And the men were not happy. “Should this continue until the feminine gender prevails the consequences would not be pleasant to dwell upon,” the Student reported.

But let’s cut the guys a little slack. This was late in the Gilded Age, and a heightened notion of manliness and masculinity was in play in American society. At many colleges, the new sport of football, established at Bates in 1893, was praised as the masculine sport. Football demanded “coolness and nerve…courage,” the Student wrote. If played in a “manly” way — without the “slugging” that marred the game — football could develop “more self-confidence and manliness” than even baseball or tennis, then the popular fall sports.

(On a national scale, this notion of manliness was also about “promoting a sense of America’s growing white imperial power — think of Teddy Roosevelt charging up San Juan Hill,” says Associate Professor of Women and Gender Studies Rebecca Herzig.)

So you can see why the Bates boys were feeling pressure to be, as Monty Python once sang, “Men, men, men.”

Responding to the Student’s comments about female enrollment was a blistering letter from William Bertram Skelton, Class of 1892, who would become a Lewiston mayor and lawyer. Fear was motivating these critics, he charged — fear that women were making Bates a more rigorous place.

He put critics into two groups. One included students “who do not succeed in causing their light to shine with quite as much dazzling splendor as they anticipated.” The second group were playboys and heathens who “have a little money and who go to college largely…to free themselves of all civilized restraints, let their hair grow long, befog their brains, stew their stomachs, and blast their reputations with dissipation, and reform afterward.”

Get over it, Skelton said. Instead, work to build up the College. “Help to put some hustle into the thing,” he wrote.

The woman in this photo, Emily Cornish, certainly hustled, and her life told another gendered story of that era. She studied at Emerson College, earned a master’s from Bates in 1899, and later taught at colleges and schools — until 1911, when she left teaching to marry botanist Walter W. Bonns.

Offering poster presentations, panel discussions, exhibits and performances, more than 250 Bates College students will take part in the fourth annual Mount David Summit, starting at 2:45 p.m. Friday, April 1, in Pettengill Hall, Andrews Road.

The summit, designed to celebrate academic achievement at Bates, will showcase student research in topics as diverse as the environmental impact of Maine bloodworm diggers, state secularism in France and the imagery used to market pharmaceuticals to consumers. In the evening, the college’s choir and Modern Dance Company offer performances.

The Mount David Summit and related weekend performances are open to the public at no charge. For more information, click here.

Established in 2002 to demonstrate the scope of student accomplishment at Bates, the summit gives students in all disciplines, and from first-years to seniors, an opportunity to share with the community their research, service-learning and creative work. The event is named for the “mountain” that is a campus landmark.

Beginning at 2:45 p.m., students working in biochemistry, biology, environmental studies, geology, mathematics and psychology will present research posters in an informal arena-style setting in Pettengill Hall’s Perry Atrium.

At the same time, panel sessions featuring short talks will take place in Pettengill Hall classrooms on topics in education, politics and communities, public health and social psychology, and the humanities.

Two concurrent poster sessions begin at 4:30 p.m. In Pettengill’s Keck Classroom (G52), students will present research on biochemistry, biology, chemistry, environmental studies and geology. In the first-floor atrium, neuroscience and psychology students will show their work. Meanwhile, in other Pettengill classrooms, short talks and panel discussions will illuminate issues in science and math, Francophone studies, the history of Japanese-American internment camps in World War II and contemporary sociology.

Two exhibitions will be on view during the summit. The annual Off-Campus Study Photography Exhibition, also in Pettengill Hall, features striking images of distant locations captured by students studying from Bates. Advanced photography students of Elke Morris, lecturer in art and visual culture, will exhibit new work in Chase Gallery, Chase Hall, 56 Campus Ave.

The dance and choir performances both begin at 8 p.m. Under the direction of Carol Dilley, assistant professor of dance, the Bates Modern Dance Company holds its annual spring concert of new works, including some choreographed by students, in Schaeffer Theatre, 305 College St.

The program will be repeated at 8 p.m. Saturday, April 2, and 2 p.m. Sunday, April 3. For more information about the dance concerts, please call 207-786-6161.

John Corrie, lecturer in music, directs the Bates College Choir in its annual spring concert in the Olin Arts Center Concert Hall, 75 Russell St. The choir program will be repeated at 8 p.m. Saturday, April 2. For more information, please call 207-786-6135.