Cambridge Women's Heritage Project Database, H

CWHP Home | Alphabetical Index | Topical Index

Cambridge Women's Heritage Project

~ H ~

Isabella (Curtis) Halsted (b. May 8 1907 in Manchester on the Sea, MA, d. December 13 2006 in Cambridge)
Activist, Business Woman
Isabella Curtis Halsted was the daughter of Charles Hopkinson, a Cambridge born portrait artist who painted over thirty members of the Harvard faculty, and Elinor Curtis, who was related to the Longfellow family. As a child, her mother spent her winters at the Longfellow House. Although she lived in Boston, Isabella also stayed in Cambridge while attending the Buckingham School. She attended Bryn Mawr College for two years in the mid-1920s and then studied at the Art Students League in New York City for two more years. In 1930, she married James Halsted, a physician, after which she lived in Boston, Cleveland, and Dedham. After the marriage ended in divorce in 1951, Isabella Halsted returned to Cambridge and decided to learn typing and stenography. Isabella worked as a dean of residents at Radcliffe, as a membership secretary at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, and eventually as director of the newly formed Boston Center for International Visitors in 1961. There she hosted foreign guests of the State Department, welcoming them into her home in Cambridge and learning about their cultures. Isabella Halsted also initiated and led a campaign to open Memorial Drive to foot traffic, during the summer months (Riverbend Park) for which she was celebrated with a memorial stone bench along Memorial Drive. Some of her letters from her father are held in the Charles Hopkinson collection in the Smithsonian Archives of American Artists. The Curtis family papers in Schlesinger Library include some material written by her mother.
References: Charles Hopkinson collection, Smithsonian Archives of American Artists; Curtis family papers in Schlesinger Library; Cambridge Chronicle 10-21-93

Alice Hamilton (b. February 27, 1869 Fort Wayne IN, d. Sept. 22, 1970, Hadlyme CT)
Toxicologist, physician
Born in Fort Wayne, Indiana to Gertrude (Pond) and Montgomery Hamilton, Alice was educated first at Miss Porter’s School in Connecticut and then attended the University of Michigan Medical School, graduating in 1893 and interned at the Hospital for Women and Children in Minneapolis and at the New England Hospital for Women and Children in Boston. In 1897, she was named the first woman professor at the Women’s Medical School of Northwestern University as professor of pathology. During this period, she lived at the famous settlement house, Hull House, founded by Jane Addams. She noticed the numbers of immigrants sickened by toxins produced by Chicago factories, and began to study occupational hazards from various chemicals. She served on the Occupational Disease Commission in Illinois and then joined the staff of the U.S. Department of Labor. In 1919, she joined the new Department of Industrial Medicine at Harvard Medical School as an assistant professor, the first woman to be appointed to the medical faculty. She remained there for sixteen years without a promotion, excluded as a member of the Harvard Faculty Club. She went on to publish a number of important books, most notably Industrial Toxicology (1934) and including an autobiography, Exploring the Dangerous Trades: The Autobiography of Alice Hamilton (1943). She was the only member of the League of Nations Health Committee (1924-1930). After her retirement, she continued to be active in both national and local groups and to support liberal causes. She was awarded many honorary degrees in her retirement years.
References: Cambridge Chronicle 09-20-00; Barbara Sicherman. Alice Hamilton M.D.: A life in Letters. Harvard University Press, 1984; Ogilvie, Marilyn and Joy Harvey. Biographical Dictionary of Women Scientists (2000).

Margaret Hamilton (b. ca 1938)
Software engineer, NASA software designer, founder of software company
Born ca. 1938, Margaret Hamilton graduated from Hancock High School in 1954 and then attended Earlham College in Richmond Indiana graduating in 1958 as a major in mathematics. She moved to Massachusetts with the intention of doing graduate study at Brandeis but instead took a position at MIT where she learned to write software for computers. She postponed her graduate work for a chance to work on software for the Apollo program and eventually became the director of software programming at MIT’s Instrumentation Laboratory for the Apollo and Skylab NASA missions, overseeing the moon flights. She produced over 130 papers, proceeding and reports.
In 1986, she founded and became CEO of Hamilton Technologies, in Cambridge MA, a software company. She has been recognized with the Augusta Ada Lovelace Award by the Association of Women in Computing in 1986 and the NASA Exceptional Space Act Award, in 2003 for her contributions to the Apollo Program and to the field of software engineering.
References: Earlham College press release March 4, 2005; NASA Office of Logic Design “About Margaret Hamilton." http://klabs.org/home_page/hamilton.htm

Beatrice Harvey (b. September 27 1923 in Cambridge)
World War II welder, community leader
Bea Harvey grew up in East Cambridge during the Depression. Her father died when he was 50, and her mother was left with 13 children. Because of family circumstances, she and her siblings were split up, and she went to live with her aunt and uncle in West Bridgewater. When she was 21, she came back to Cambridge and worked at various jobs in Central Square, including Woolworth’s and Gorin’s. During World War II, she became a welder at the Quincy shipyard. Later on, she worked at Necco and Fanny Farmer where she rolled candy and at Fenton Shoe where she put the “faces” on children’s slippers. After her husband died in 1996, Bea became tenant president of Manning Apartments, where she has been a strong advocate for tenants’ rights, as well as a member of the crime watch group. She works part time as a school lunch cashier in the city’s schools. Bea had six children, three of whom died tragically; 10 grandchildren, and 2 great-grandchildren.
Reference: Oral interview by Sarah Boyer

Suzanne Radley Hiatt (b. September 21, 1936 in Hartford CN, d. May 30, 2002)
Episcopal priest , feminist theologian, educator
Born in Hartford, the Rev. Dr. Suzanne Hiatt was the oldest child of Alfred and Frances Hiatt. Brought up in Minnesota, she attended high school in Edina MN. She started college at Wellesley and graduated from Radcliffe College in 1958. After graduating as Master of Divinity from Episcopal Theological School in 1964, she went on to study for her master‘s degree in social work from Boston University in 1965. For a while, she worked for a Presbyterian church in Minnesota helping the ghetto poor. She moved to Philadelphia where she organized a group to represent the poor (Welfare Rights Organization). She then worked with the Episcopal Diocese in Philadelphia and began to advocate for women and the ordination of women priests. She organized and participated in the first women’s ordination in July 29 1974, though they did not then have the permission of their bishops or the church government at that time. After the Episcopal Church's General Convention in 1976, where ordination of women was approved, she was then regularly ordained in 1977.
Hiatt returned to Cambridge in 1975 and joined the Episcopal Divinity School where she eventually rose to full professor as the John Seely Stone Professor of Pastoral Theology, Cambridge. In 1997, she was Acting Director of Congregational Studies. The Suzanne Hiatt Chair in Feminist Pastoral Theology was named after her. In 1993, she published with Emily C Hewitt, Women Priests, Yes or No? She contributed extensive book chapters and articles on a variety of topics. She presented a woman for ordination of the Diocese of London’s first ordination of women in St Paul’s Cathedral in 1994. Hiatt received an Honorary LLD from Regis College in 1988. Suzanne Hiatt died of cancer at Chilton Hospice , Cambridge. Her papers are held at Columbia University, Union Theological Seminary, Archive of Women in Theological Scholarship.
References: The Witness magazine Monday, July 15, 2002, Cambridge Chronicle June 5 2002. Biographical note, Archive of Women in Theological Scholarship by Leslie Reyman: (October 2000) http://www.columbia.edu/cu/lweb/img/assets/6396/Hiatt_SFA51305PDF.pdf

Agnes Boyle (O'Reilly) Hocking (b. in Boston, d. 1955 in Cambridge)
Co-founder of Shady Hill School
Agnes Boyle O'Reilly was the daughter of Irish-born Catholic poet and editor of The Pilot, John Boyle O'Reilly. She married      William Ernest Hocking, then an instructor in comparative religion at Andover Theological Seminary, in Boston on June 28, 1905. They had three children, Richard Hocking (1906-2001), Hester Campbell (b. 1909), and Joan Kracke (b.1911). The couple moved to Berkeley, California, then to New Haven, Connecticut, and finally back to Cambridge in 1914, when William obtained positions in the philosophy departments of UC, Yale, and Harvard respectively. He was named Alford Professor of Natural Religion and Moral Philosophy in 1920.
     William and Agnes Hocking founded the Cooperative Open-Air School in the spring of 1915 located at their home at 16 Quincy Street in Cambridge. Parents shared teaching duties and generally believed in teaching from primary sources, without textbooks, and encouraging children’s exposure to plenty of fresh air in the classrooms. In 1917, the school moved to the Charles Eliot Norton estate near Shady Hill Square at the corner of Holden and Scott streets and adopted the name Shady Hill School around 1917-18. In October 1926, the school relocated to Coolidge Hill in Cambridge. The couple continued their strong interest in the project and correspondence with the directors until their deaths.
     The correspondence of Agnes and her husband, and multiple letters from others concerning Shady Hill School and many other topics is to be found in the William Ernest Hocking papers in Houghton Library Harvard University and additional letters (about Shady Hill) in the Katherine Taylor Papers in Schlesinger Library. There is also a folder in the WEH papers from Cambridge Historical Society (Mass.), “ Correspondence with WEH, 1950” with a letter from Agnes Hocking concerning the history of the Shady Hill School.
Reference: Finding aid and list of archives, William Ernest Hocking papers, Houghton Library Harvard University.

Winifred Holman (fl 1659)
Accused and acquitted of witchcraft
A widow, living in Cambridge, Winifred Holman, and her daughter Mary were accused in the summer of 1659 of witchcraft by a family living nearby. The neighbors included John Gibson, his wife, and their married daughter, Rebecca Stearns. Over some time previously, Rebecca began to experience unexplained fits in which she barked like a dog and screamed that Mrs. Holman and her daughter were witches. Her parents became alarmed and sought an explanation. In an indictment they prepared, the Gibsons claimed that Winifred Holman had offered herbs to their daughter during a previous fit and noticed that the daughter, Rebecca, seemed worse whenever she saw the Holmans. They also cited some assistance by the Holmans to their daughter’s child after the child had fallen ill that did not result in any improvement. The indictment included observations on the behavior of Winifred Holman and her poultry, which the Gibsons considered peculiar, attributing the death of some of their own hens to witchcraft. This indictment could have had serious consequences since an unfortunate woman, Goody Kendal had been executed as a witch in Cambridge because of a claim by the nurse of a child that she had “made much of” a child and caused its sudden death.
In defense of her character as a “good Christian woman,” Mrs. Holman submitted certificates signed by two deacons and her neighbors that said she was diligent in attending church and had never been perceived to do or say anything or to give any grounds to suspect her of “witchery”. Without the hysteria that engulfed similar cases in Salem thirty years later, the case was dismissed. Mary and Winifred Holman then brought two suits in the county courts at the end of March 1660 against John Gibson and his daughter Rebecca Stearns for defamation.
Reference: Lucius R.Paige. A History of Cambridge 1630 -1877 with a Genealogical Register Boston, Cambridge 1877, 856-863.

Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins (b. 1859 in Portland, Maine, d. August 13 1930 in Cambridge)
African American writer
Pauline Hopkins was born in Maine but came to Boston as a young girl where she attended Girls High School. After winning a writing competition at the age of fifteen sponsored by the African-American playwright, novelist, essayist, historian, and abolitionist, William Wells Brown (1814-1884), she began to write seriously. At the age of twenty, she wrote a musical drama “Slaves Escape or the Underground Railroad”. She both produced the play and performed a central role. In order to support herself, she worked as a stenographer with the Massachusetts Bureau of Statistics, beginning her professional literary career only in 1900 when she published a short story in the first issue of The Colored American Magazine. She wrote continuously for the magazine, eventually becoming its literary editor. Her work includes many short stories, essays, and two serialized novels: Winona: A Tale of Negro Life in the South and Southwest and Of One Blood: or, The Hidden Self. In 1905, ill health forced Hopkins to return to work as a stenographer at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Her final literary work was a series of articles entitled, "Dark Races of the Twentieth Century," published during 1904-1905 in The Voice of the Negro. Mainly interested in the problems of the black middle class, she was one of the first black women writers in America.
References: The Unruly Voice: Rediscovering Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins. Ed. John C. Gruesser. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1996. Cambridge Public Library online site “Penwomen of Cambridge Past: Biographies of Our Literary Foremothers”: http://www.ci.cambridge.ma.us/cpl/about/penwomen.html

Cornelia Horsford (b. September 25, 1861 in Cambridge. d. 1941? in Cambridge)
Amateur archaeologist, Author
Cornelia Horsford was born in Cambridge, the daughter of Eben Norton Horsford, a professor of chemistry at the Lawrence Scientific School, Harvard University and his second wife Phoebe (Gardiner). She attended private schools in Cambridge and Boston. Her father, after making a fortune from the manufacture of baking powder, became an enthusiastic amateur archaeologist, convinced that Leif Erikson had landed in North America and resided along the Charles River. He purchased land and erected a tower and monument to this theory in Weston MA at the junction of the Charles and Stony Brook Rivers. Just before his death in 1893, he asked his daughter to carry on his work.
In subsequent years, Cornelia Horsford published his unfinished writings along with her own studies. In her essay “Graves of the Northmen,” published with her father’s writings in 1893, Miss Horsford gave an interesting description of the supposed traces of Leif Ericson at Gerry’s Landing, in Cambridge, first claimed by her father. She also organized archaeological expeditions in Iceland in 1895, in the British Isles, 1895, 1896, 1897; and directed investigations of the Norse discovery of America. She was the author of An Inscribed Stone, 1895; Ruins of the Saga-Time; and “a popular article “Vinland and its Ruins: Some of the evidence that Northmen were in Massachusetts in pre-Columbian days” Popular Science Monthly (December, 1899). Her later work was devoted mainly to the discovery of other similar ruins and her attempts to show that similar North American ruins were identical with those to be found in Iceland and Greenland.
Horsford was also a member of the Mass. Horticultural Society; Colonial Dames of Massachusetts; and the Icelandic Antiquarian Society. She lived in her family home at 27 Craigie Street, Cambridge and summered on Shelter Island, Long Island. Her family letters are in Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute Library archives. Twelve letters to Franz Boas are in American Philosophical Society Boas collection (Philadelphia).
References: Horsford family papers, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute Library; Cambridge Chronicle, July 2, 1998.

Lois Lilley Howe (b. September 25, 1864 in Cambridge, d. September 13, 1964 in Cambridge)
Architect; fellow, American Institute of Architects

Lois Lilley Howe, courtesy MIT Museum

     Lois Lilley Howe was born on September 25, 1864 in Cambridge, Massachusetts. She was the eldest of four children of Dr. Estes and Lois Lilly (White) Howe. The family originally lived at 1 Oxford Street in Cambridge where they owned an acre of land and a few farm animals. Howe attended Miss Olmsted’s and then Miss Page’s elementary schools from 1868 – 1877 and graduated from the Cambridge public high school in 1882. From a young age, Howe showed an interest in architecture. The workers building the Sanders Theatre at Harvard College in 1876 dubbed her “the little superintendent” for her constant comments on their project.
     From 1882 – 1886 Howe was a student at The School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Her focus at the Museum School was in design. Her later architectural work reflected this artistic training, and she maintained contacts with artists throughout her life. She became a member of the Copley Society of Boston, an association of artists, in 1883. She joined the Council of the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in 1897; later the Museum School named her an annual "Visitor to the School." She also served as director of the Boston Society of Arts and Crafts from 1916 to 1919.
    Howe’s father passed away in 1887. Shortly after his death, the family sold the house on Oxford Street and moved to 2 Appleton Street. As a result of Howe’s alteration of a stairway of the Oxford street home, which had been purchased by Reverend Francis G. Peabody, she gained the admiration of his brother and architect, Robert Swain Peabody, who became her mentor.
     In 1888, Howe entered MIT's School of Architecture and took the two-year “Partial Architecture” course. During this time, she was a founding member of MIT’s first woman student’s group, Eta Sigma Mu (later known as Cleofan.)
     Upon graduating from MIT in 1890, Howe worked as a drafter, artist and librarian in the Department of Architecture at MIT and for herself at the Boston architectural firm of Allen and Kenway. In 1893 she submitted an application, on Allen and Kenway letterhead with a recommendation from Robert Peabody, to build the Woman’s Building at the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair. Her former MIT classmate Sophia Hayden also entered the competition. Hayden won and Howe placed second. Howe used the prize money for a long awaited trip to Europe.

Courtesy MIT Museum.
Photo by Florence Maynard.

          After fifteen months abroad, Howe returned to America and began her practice at 73 Tremont Street in Boston. She received her first commission to build a house in 1894, and worked alone and with various partners until 1900. She established her own firm in 1901 at 101 Tremont Street, Boston.
     Also in 1901, Howe, sponsored again by Robert Peabody, became the second woman elected to the A.I.A. (American Institute of Architects). She was the first woman elected to the Boston Society of Architects.
     Howe concentrated on domestic architecture from the beginning of her architectural career with an emphasis on history and detail. Noted projects of Howe’s at this time were her 1901 and 1904 renovations of the Griswold residence at 23 Craigie Street in Cambridge. Howe was also noted for pioneering the use of stucco. Articles about her plasterwork appeared in Architectural Review and Architectural Record. In a 1907 issue of Architectural Revew, she gave advice about designing serving pantries for small houses.
     In 1913 Howe co-published, with MIT graduate Constance Fuller, Details of Old New England Houses. Howe became known for her “ability to create simple, efficient floor plans; and her effort to minimize expense.” “Howe used to see the house being torn down and would run quickly and take the mantels and doors.”(Allaback).
     Howe branched out in 1913 when she became partners with Eleanor Manning. Manning brought a concern for public housing and urban renewal to the firm. In the early 1920’s Howe and Manning participated in the design of Mariemont, Ohio a planned community outside of Cincinnati using the principles of John Nolan and the English garden city as a model. They were also asked to submit designs by McCall’s magazine for its small house series.
     Howe and Manning further expanded in 1926 when they acquired a third partner, Mary Almy, like Howe, a native of Cambridge. This same year, the firm won first prize for The Charles Almy House in a Cape Code competition sponsored by House Beautiful.
     Howe was active on several housing planning commissions throughout her life, but organizations concerned with housing problems represented only part of her activities. She supported women's educational opportunities as a member of the American Association of University Women and as the MIT representative for the General Committee of the "Naples Table," which later became the Association to Aid Scientific Research by Women. Perhaps Howe’s greatest honor came in 1931, when she became the first woman Fellow of the A.I.A.
     At the age of 73, Howe retired from Howe, Manning & Almy in 1937, after practicing for more than forty years. After retirement, she occasionally worked on commissions for Eleanor O'Connor's private practice and was active in a number of Cambridge social clubs.
     Lois Lilley Howe passed away in Cambridge on September 13, 1964 just twelve days short of her hundredth birthday. She is buried at Mount Auburn Cemetery, Cambridge.
References
"Serving Pantries in Small Houses." Architectural Review, vol. 14, no. 3 (March 1907).
Howe, Lois L. and Constance Fuller Details from Old New England Houses. New York: Architectural Book Publishing Co., 1913.
"An Architectural Monograph: The Colonel Robert Means House at Amherst, New Hampshire." New York: R. F. Whitehead, 1927, White Pine Series of Architectural Monographs, vol. 13, no. 5.
"An Alumna's Architectural Career," Technology Review, vol. 66, no. 2 (December 1963), pp. 21, 38.
Cambridge Historical Society Proceedings.
Howe, Manning & Almy Papers,1883-1972, MIT archives and special collections.
http://libraries.mit.edu/archives/collections-mc/mc9.html#howe
Allaback, Sarah. The First American Women Architects. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2007
Cole, Doris and Taylor, Karen Cord, The Lady Architects, Mid March Arts Press: New York, 1990
Nathanson, Larry MD, “Lois Lilly Howe: Pioneer Career Woman, Architect, Cambridge Citizen”. Cambridge in the Twentieth Century, Cambridge Historical Society, edited by D. Abeel. Cambridge, Mass., 2007.

Ruth Hubbard (b. 1925 in Vienna, Austria)
Biologist; biochemist; social activist
Ruth Hubbard was born in Vienna, Austria and escaped the Nazi regime with her family when she thirteen. The family moved to the Boston area. Ruth attended Radcliffe College, graduating in 1945. She went on to study biochemistry and biology at Harvard. Entering George Wald’s laboratory at Harvard, she did important work on the biochemistry of the visual system, working out the enzymatic interconversion of retinal and retinol for her PhD in 1950. After receiving fellowships that took her to London and Copenhagen, she returned to Harvard. She married Wald in 1958 with whom she had a daughter and a son. The couple was awarded the Paul Karrer Medal from the University of Zurich for studies of biochemistry of vertebrates and invertebrates in 1967. After George Wald was awarded the Nobel prize in 1967, he became deeply concerned with issues of peace, in which Ruth joined him.
She was tenured as professor of biology at Harvard in 1974, the first woman tenured in the department. In the late seventies and early eighties, she created innovative courses on biology and politics from a feminist perspective. She began to publish studies of the politics of women's health, on the position of women in academia and research and, more recently, on the ethics of gene therapy and genetic testing including, The Politics of Women’s Biology (1990); Profitable Promises: Essays on Women Science and Health (1994); and Exploding the Gene Myth, with her son Elijah Wald, (1993). She was a board member of Science for the People in the 1970s and 1980s, along with geneticists Richard Lewontin and Jonathan Beckwith. She is a founding board member of The Council for Responsible Genetics. Retiring in 1990, she is currently professor emerita in the Department of Molecular and Cellular Biology at Harvard. In 2003, she was awarded an honorary Doctorate of Science by Clark University. In May 2005, the Massachusetts American Civil Liberties Union presented her with the Luther Knight Macnair award for her work on bioethics.
References: Benjamin F. Shearer and Barbara Smith Shearer Notable Women in the Life Sciences. Westport CN 1996.; R. Hubbard and E. Wald. “George Wald Memorial Talk” in Rhodopsin and Photransduction, pp. 5-20. Chichester: [Novartis Foundation Symposium 224]; Online conversation with Frank Aqueno in 1993 http://members.aol.com/qbchoice/EXPLODING.html.

Anna Vaughn (Hyatt) Huntington (b. March 10, 1876 in Cambridge, d. October 4, 1973 in Connecticut)
Sculptor, philanthropist, founder of wildlife preserves
Anna Vaughn Hyatt was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, daughter of Audella (Beebe) and Alpheus Hyatt. Her father was a curator of fossil invertebrates at Museum of Comparative Zoology, Harvard, professor of paleontology and zoology at MIT and a founder of Woods Hole Marine Biological Laboratories. Through her father, she developed an interest in animals and animal anatomy. She was educated in private schools in Cambridge. She began to study sculpture in Boston and then went to New York to study at the Arts Students League in the early 1900s. She began to observe animals at zoos and circuses. Her first exhibition was at the Boston Arts Club in 1900 and she soon became nationally known. From 1906 to 1910 she lived and worked in France and Italy, exhibiting her animal statues and an equestrian statue of Joan of Arc at the Paris Salon. She returned to New York where she prepared a public statue of Joan of Arc, and a wall statue for the Cathedral of St John the Divine. In 1923, she married Archer Milton Huntington, the adopted son of a railroad tycoon, who from this time on supported her work. The couple joined in philanthropic projects for museums and in the preservation of wildlife, funding more than fourteen museums and setting up an outdoor sculpture museum for American sculpture at Brookgreen Gardens, South Carolina. In 1940, she and her husband moved to an estate, Stenerigg, in Redding Ridge Connecticut where she continued set up a large studio. There both husband and wife practiced organic farming and founded a bird sanctuary. After the death of her husband in 1955, she began a large number animal studies as well as monumental equestrian statues, the last completed when she was ninety. She died at the age of ninety seven at her estate, which is now the Collis P Huntington State Park.
References: Notable American Women, Modern Period; Encyclopedia Britannica, Wikipedia

Marjorie Hurd (b. June 24, 1886 in Boston, d. April 1, 1977 in Cambridge)
Lawyer, Volunteer, Sportswoman
Born in Boston in 1886, Marjorie Hurd was the daughter of Alfred Dennis Hurd and Louisa Maria (Coolidge) Hurd. Her father worked in publishing and insurance; her mother was an incorporator of the Salem Woman’s Club when the family moved to Salem, Massachusetts in 1896. Marjorie’s early influences included her paternal grandfather, Melancthon Montgomery Hurd, whose publishing company, Hurd & Houghton, evolved into today’s Houghton Mifflin Company; her maternal grandfather, Horace Hopkins Coolidge, a leading Boston attorney and president of the Massachusetts Senate; and her uncle William Williamson Coolidge, an attorney and mountain climber. As a girl, Marjorie attended the school kept by Bertha Hazard and Elizabeth J. Woodward in Boston’s Back Bay, “Miss B. M. Howe’s” Hamilton Hall School on Salem’s Chestnut Street, and Salem High School. She entered Radcliffe College in Cambridge as a member of the Class of 1908 to study history and economics. Her yearbook motto was: “I am not daunted, no; I will engage.” Marjorie Hurd, photo courtesy of the Hurd family

Marjorie Hurd, photo courtesy of the Hurd family

      After graduating from Radcliffe, Marjorie became involved in social service work. She returned to her alma mater in 1910 to pursue an advanced degree, earning her A.M. in government and economics. That same year, Marjorie and her family moved to 44 Walker Street, Cambridge. She also took the civil service examination, and received the highest percentage among her fellow test-takers. Marjorie’s first job was as a “special agent” for the Massachusetts Minimum Wage Commission, where she began a lifelong professional relationship with the Women’s Educational and Industrial Union in Boston (WEIU). She also studied statistics with Professor William Z. Ripley at Harvard from 1912-13, and in 1915 she was one of nine students to enroll in the first graduate level law school for women in America—the Cambridge Law School for Women, which was founded in 1915 by Professor Joseph H. Beale of the Harvard Law School. At the same time, Marjorie worked in the afternoons for the Cambridge Social Union (the precursor to today’s Cambridge Center for Adult Education), and she was elected to the prestigious Phi Beta Kappa. Unfortunately, the law school was short-lived but, undaunted, Marjorie took courses at the Portia School of Law on Boston’s Beacon Hill—the first law school in the country to admit women with or without a college degree. She also worked as a legal clerk for the law firm of Hale & Dorr. In 1918, at the age of 32, Marjorie was admitted to the Massachusetts Bar. Between 1919 and 1920, she worked for the law firm of Dunbar, Nutter & McClennen, and in 1920, Marjorie joined the staff of the Boston Legal Aid Society (BLAS) as its first female attorney. She remained there for 35 years. That same year, the family moved to 4 Mercer Circle, Cambridge, just off Brattle Street.
     Along with her distinguished law career, Marjorie was an avid mountain climber, rock climber, camper, canoeist, swimmer and snowshoe-r. She traveled all over the world, climbing the Matterhorn, Mont Blanc, and the more difficult Dolomites; she also scaled every 4,000-footer in the White Mountains (celebrating her 80th birthday on the summit of Mount Washington), and knew well the peaks in the Canadian Rockies and Sierra Nevada. The Christian Science Monitor once described her as a “petite sportswoman” as she stood less than five feet tall. When she was at home in Cambridge, Marjorie was an active volunteer including for the Appalachian Mountain Club (editor, officer, life member), Women’s Travel Club, Massachusetts Bar Association, Massachusetts Association of Women Lawyers (serving as vice president and president), Business Women’s Club, Cambridge Civic Association, Cambridge League of Women Voters (which met in her home at 4 Mercer Circle), and, late in life, the Mount Auburn Hospital Coffee Shop. She was an active Radcliffe alumna and a member of the First Parish in Cambridge, Unitarian. Marjorie never married, but she was devoted to her brother Jack’s three sons and one daughter, Lydia, in whose education Marjorie took a special interest. Marjorie made it possible for Lydia to attend Buckingham School, Radcliffe College (for two degrees), and the Harvard School of Education. Lydia Hurd earned an Ed.D. from Harvard and went on to found the Master of Arts in Teaching (MAT) program at Simmons College in Boston.
     Marjorie died in 1977 at the age of 90 and was buried at Mount Auburn Cemetery. During the memorial service held for her at First Parish, Marjorie’s friend Christine Reid noted, “her infectious laugh, her quick wit, her keen, incisive, legally trained mind, and her overflowing enthusiasm for the many and varied activities in which she participated won her countless friends and admirers during her long and productive life. Her sometimes brusque manner concealed her warm and generous heart, and she will be long remembered with deep admiration by those of us who were privileged to have known her.”
References: Marjorie Hurd Papers, Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Harvard University; Radcliffe College alumni files; Social Law Library files, Supreme Judicial Court; New England School of Law files; Hurd family files. Photograph courtesy of the Hurd family.
For more detailed bio, see http://www.hurdsmith.com/marjoriehurd.htm