Notes for: Helen Magill
A social scientist and educator, she holds the distinction of being the first female Ph.D. recipient in the United States, which she earned from Boston University in 1877. Her father was the second president of Swarthmore College.
Helen Magill White (b. November 28, 1853, Providence, Rhode Island — d. October 28, 1944, Kittery Point, Maine) was the first woman to earn a Ph.D. in the United States.
Raised in a Quaker family, White always believed that she was deserving of the same education as a man. In 1859, the family moved to Boston, where Helen signed up as the only female student in the Boston Public Latin School, where her father was submaster.[1] Her father was the president of Swarthmore College, which she attended as an undergraduate in 1873. She was a member of the first class to graduate from the university. She continued studies in the classics at Swarthmore and Boston University, where she earned her Ph.D in 1877. After that, up until 1881, she studied at the University of Cambridge, in England, placing third in her tripos (honors examinations) at Newnham College. [2]
After being the principal for a year at a private school in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, she was selected in 1883 to organize Howard Collegiate Institute, in West Bridgewater, Massachusetts. She was the director of Howard until 1887, when she resigned. She taught for a short amount of time at Evelyn College, a women's annex to Princeton University. She then suffered an illness for the next few years, while she taught at a high school.
Helen met Andrew D. White, the retired president of Cornell University, while presenting a paper at the American Social Science Association in 1887, and married him in September 1890. White was also a college classmate of Magill's father, Edward Hicks Magill. She accompanied her husband to his diplomatic posts in St. Petersburg (1892-94) and Berlin (1897-1903). She didn’t participate in public or educational affairs after that, except to oppose women's suffrage publicly in 1913. After White died in 1918, she lived abroad and in Ithaca, New York, and then retired to Kittery Point, Maine, where she died in 1944.[3]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helen_Magill_White