White, Helen Magill (1853–1944)

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White, Helen Magill (1853–1944)

First American woman to earn a doctorate . Name variations: Helen Magill. Born on November 28, 1853, in Providence, Rhode Island; died on October 28, 1944, in Kittery Point, Maine; daughter of Edward Hicks Magill (an educator) and Sarah (Beans) Magill; attended Boston Public Latin School; graduated in the first class at Swarthmore College, 1873; Boston University, Ph.D. in Greek, 1877; graduate studies at Cambridge University, England, 1877–81; married Andrew D. White (a diplomat and former president of Cornell University), on September 10, 1890 (died 1918); children: Karin Andreevna; one who died in infancy.

Became the first American woman to receive a doctorate (1877); teaching career ended (mid-1880s); lived with husband in Russia (1892–94) and Germany (1897–1903); spoke out against women's suffrage (1913).

Born in 1853 in Providence, Rhode Island, Helen Magill White was one of five daughters of Quakers Edward Hicks Magill, a classicist, and Sarah Beans Magill . Her father's commitment to the education of women allowed for all the Magill girls to become sufficiently well educated to pursue careers as college teachers. Helen showed special promise as a student, and when her father assumed the position of sub-master at the prestigious Boston Public Latin School for boys, she became the only girl to study there. At age 15, she enrolled in the first class of the recently founded Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania, shortly before her father became the school's president. After graduating in 1873 as the second in her class, White spent two more years at Swarthmore in what would now be called postgraduate studies. She then began studying Greek at Boston University. In 1877, she became the first American woman to earn a doctorate, with a dissertation on Greek drama. The following four years she spent in England, pursuing classical studies at Newnham College of Cambridge University.

Upon her return to the United States, White embarked on a teaching career with an appointment as principal of a private school in Johnstown, Pennsylvania. She left this position in 1883, to accept the opportunity to organize the Howard Collegiate Institute, a newly established women's school in West Bridgewater, Massachusetts. With authority to select teachers, she appointed two of her sisters to the school, and her father contributed by investing in a laboratory and a gym. Although the student body grew under White's administration, a combination of family problems and a conflict with the trustees over her campaign for better sewage caused her to resign in 1887. She then briefly held teaching positions at Evelyn College, a women's annex to Princeton University that soon shut down, and at Brooklyn High School, but her career was effectively over by the time she turned 35. Plagued by illness and depression, White blamed herself for her failure to mold her phenomenal education into a successful career.

In 1890, she married Andrew Dickson White, a diplomat, contemporary of her father's, and former president of Cornell University whom she had met three years earlier, around the time his first wife died. Their initial introduction had come at a meeting of the American Social Science Association, at which he had been impressed with a paper she read. Now the wife of a diplomat, and soon a mother, she lived with her family in Russia while Andrew served as U.S. minister and ambassador there from 1892 to 1894. In 1897, he received a similar position in Germany, where they lived until 1903. As a diplomat's spouse White generally avoided involvement in political or social issues, preferring to indulge in her interest in music. She also earned a reputation as a brilliant conversationalist, well able to discuss such subjects as architecture, sculpture, music and literature with the kaiser himself. After witnessing the actions of militant suffragists in England in 1913, she became a public and vocal opponent of women's suffrage, which she believed (despite, or perhaps in part because of, her own educational experiences) would be detrimental to women's well being. Some years after her husband's death in 1918 White retired to Kittery Point, Maine, where she died in 1944.