Cambridge Women's Heritage Project Database, M

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Cambridge Women's Heritage Project

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Helen Wendler (Deane) Markham (b. 1917 in North Carolina, d. July 20, 1966 in New York)
Biologist, histochemist, humanitarian
Helen Deane Markham was brought up in Springfield, MA, where she attended the public schools. She studied at Wellesley College, then attended Brown University to pursue a graduate degree in biology, and took her Ph.D. in 1943. She spent the following year as a lecturer at McGill University and came to live in Cambridge in 1944 and work in the Department of Anatomy at Harvard Medical School. She married George Markham in 1947. The couple was involved in various humanitarian endeavors. While an assistant professor at Harvard, her husband, George Markham, was the Progressive Party candidate for state representative. She became the victim of McCarthy red-baiting at Harvard in 1953, when she was called before the Jenner Committee, and her position at Harvard was terminated. She returned, however, to work with Professor Alexander Forbes at the Biological Laboratories at Harvard on visual mechanisms. In 1967, she went to the Albert Einstein School of Medicine, where she rose to the rank of full professor. She became recognized as a distinguished histochemist, doing significant work on the adrenal glands and ovaries, and publishing 147 journal articles. (Histochemistry is a biological science that uses various methods to identify certain cell or tissue structures on a microscopic level.) She was a founding member of the Histochemical Society. She died of cancer at the age of 49.
References: Harvard Annual Reports, 1952-1953; Roy O Greep, “Professor Helen Wendler (Deane) Markham” J Histochemisty and Cytochemisty 14: 881-2, 1967.

Lorna Marshall (b. 1898 in Arizona; d. July 8, 2002 in Peterborough NH)
Anthropologist
     Lorna Marshall wrote important studies on the !Kung tribe of Africa. She graduated with an English degree from the University of California, Berkeley, then taught English at Mount Holyoke College. In the 1920s, she married Lawrence Marshall, a co-founder of Raytheon Corporation, and settled in Cambridge, where they lived for many years. While her husband worked on magneton tubes used in radar for US and Allied ships during World War II, she helped integrate the Raytheon production lines. In 1949, near the retirement of her husband from the company, the couple with their two children went to study the !Kung, a hunter-gatherer tribe in the Kalahari desert in southern Africa, the trip being sponsored by Harvard’s Peabody Museum. Lorna began to seriously study anthropology and produce scholarly papers. Lorna’s teenage son, John, began to film her interviews and eventually became an acclaimed anthropological documentary filmmaker. Over a period of two decades, Lorna Marshall spent more time in Botswana and Namibia than she did in Cambridge, developing close personal ties to the !Kung. She published two well-received monographs, !Kung of Nyae Nyae (1975) and, when she was in her late nineties, Nyae Nyae !Kung Belief and Rites (1999).
     Lorna Marshall spent the last years of her life near her daughter in Peterborough, New Hampshire. Schlesinger holds a diary of Lorna Marshall that includes planning for dinners, including a manuscript cookbook. Her expedition diaries are held at Peabody Museum, Harvard University.
     Her daughter, Elizabeth Marshall Thomas, Her daughter also became a serious student of anthropology. Only nineteen when she first went with her mother to Africa, Thomas continued her mother’s work. As early as 1959, in her late twenties, Thomas published a study of the group, The Harmless People, which was highly praised. More recently, she has branched out into fictional accounts of stone-age people and an updated account of her early field work with her family in The Old Way, a Story of the First People (2006).
References: Boston Globe obituary July 24, 2002; Lorna Marshall notebooks 1943-1996, Peabody Museum, Harvard University; Elizabeth Marshall Thomas, The Old Way, a Story of the First People (2006); http://www.popmatters.com/pm/books/reviews/9447/the-old-way-a-story-of-the-first-people-by-elizabeth-marshall-thomas

Agnes Mongan (b. January 21, 1905, in Somerville, MA, d. September 15, 1996, in Cambridge)
Art historian, art curator
Born to Charles Edward Mongan, a well-to-do physician, and Elizabeth Teresa (O'Brien), Mongan attended the Cambridge School (for Girls) and then went to Bryn Mawr College, where she studied art history and English literature, graduating in 1927. The following year she studied Italian art in a Smith College seminar that studied in Florence, Northern Italy, Paris, and Central Europe. She returned to Cambridge, where she lived for the rest of her life, earning her master's degree from Smith College in 1929. That year she began to work at the Fogg Art Museum as a research assistant under Paul Sachs, preparing a catalogue of his collection of drawings. She soon became an important part of the museum and from 1937 to 1947 her title was Keeper of Drawings. By 1947 she was named Curator of Drawings, the first woman to be named curator at the Fogg, retaining this title until her retirement in 1975. She was also an important administrator of the museum. Between 1951 and 1968, she rose from Assistant Director of the Fogg, to Associate Director, then Acting Director. From 1969 to 1971 she served as Director of the Fogg Museum, retiring in 1971, but retaining her position as Curator of Drawings for a further four years. She produced a number of important catalogues, including: Drawings in the Fogg Museum of Art (1940), The Ingres Centennial Exhibition, 1867-1967 (1967), One Hundred Master Drawings, presented in honor of Paul J. Sachs (1949), and David to Corot: French Drawings in the Fogg Museum of Art (1996).
Agnes Mongan was visiting professor and visiting curator at a number of universities and museums, and was awarded honorary degrees from Smith, Wheaton, Colby, University of Notre Dame, and Boston College. Harvard honored her by opening the Agnes Mongan Center for the Study of Prints, Drawings, and Photographs. She died in Cambridge at the age of ninety-one. Her papers are held in the Harvard Art Museum archives, Harvard University.
References: Biography of Agnes Mongan, Agnes Mongan papers, Harvard Art Museum Archives; Harvard University Gazette, September19, 1996.

Dorothea May Moore (b. May 13, 1894 in Providence RI d. June 5, 1995 in Needham?)
Cambridge Pediatrician
     Dorothea Moore was the daughter Edward Caldwell Moore and Eliza Coe (Brown) Moore. Her father was a minister in the Congregational Church in Rhode Island until he was appointed a professor at Harvard in philosophy and theology. She attended attended the Gilman School in Cambridge and then a private school in Boston. She graduated from Byrn Mawr College in 1915 and when she was a senior she decided to become an MD. She attended Radcliffe Graduate School to prepare, took classes at Harvard Medical School (which still did not admit women into the regular program), completing her medical degree at Johns Hopkins Medical School in 1922 after working during World War I as a laboratory technician in bacteriology at an American Red Cross hospital in France.
     Moore interned at Bellevue Hospital and worked in the clinics of the obstetrical department of New York State Department of Maternity, Infancy and Child Hygiene. In 1925, she was appointed as the first woman intern at New York Nursery and Child's Hospital in New York where she contracted diphtheria. Forced to recuperate for a year, she returned to intern in a pediatric department of University Hospital in Rochester. She then taught for a year at Yale Medical School, and then held a research position at Cornell Medical School before returning to Cambridge to practice.
     In 1934, she established a successful thirty-year private practice in Cambridge and became an active member of the Child Care Association, the Head Start Program, and monthly well-child conferences in southern Massachusetts. She practiced also in the outpatient clinics of Children’s Hospital in Boston and taught pediatrics at Harvard Medical School from 1937-1968. She was a fellow of the American Association of Pediatrics. In 1941, she married Arthur Burkhard, a professor of German literature but continued to practice under her own name. She published many articles in pediatric journals. From 1955 to 1985, she sat on the board of directors of the Cambridge Mental Health Association, retiring at the age of ninety. She died eleven years later, at 101.
References: Schlesinger Library: Papers of Dorothea May Moore; Obituary (as Dorothea Moore Burkhard) AAP (American Academy of Pediatrics) News Vol. 12 No. 2 February 1996, p. 25.

Maud (Cabot) Morgan (b. 1903 in New York City, d. March 14, 1999, in Cambridge)
Artist, art teacher
Born in New York City, Maud Cabot graduated from Barnard College in 1926 and traveled to Paris to study at the Sorbonne. She did not begin to paint until she was twenty-four when she met her future husband, the artist Pat Morgan, in the late 1920s in Paris. In 1929, the couple moved back to New York, where she studied at the Arts Student League under Kimon Nicolaides. She then studied with Hans Hofmann and began to exhibit at galleries in New York. In 1938 she had a successful show at the Julian Levy Gallery, during which some of her paintings sold to the Whitney Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Museum of Modern Art. In 1940 she and her husband moved to Andover, MA, where he taught art at Phillips Academy, and she began to teach at the nearby girls’ boarding school, Abbot Academy. The couple had two children. In 1957 she separated from her husband and moved to Boston, then, a few years later, to Cambridge, where she lived and painted for the rest of her life. She continued to exhibit in New York, primarily at the Betty Parsons Gallery, where she was included in joint exhibitions with Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, Robert Motherwell, and other notable contemporary artists. Morgan had two retrospective exhibitions, 1967-1968 at the Fitchburg (Massachusetts) Art Museum, and 1977 at the Addison Gallery of American Art. In 1970, after her divorce was final, she spent six months in Africa. She returned to Cambridge and lectured on art at Harvard and MIT and taught at Lesley College’s Institute for the Arts and Human Development.
In 1980 a film about Morgan’s art, “Light Coming Through,” was produced by Rickie Leacock, the head of the MIT film department. The film premiered at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and was later shown at the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) in New York and the Place Pompidou in Paris. In her eighties and nineties, she continued painting, displaying continuing creativity. She received an Honor Award in 1987 from the Women's Caucus for Art. Since 1993 the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, which holds a number of her significant paintings, has awarded the Maud Morgan prize yearly to a mid-career woman artist. In 1995, at the age of ninety-two, she published an autobiography, Maud’s Journey: A Life From Art. She died four years later in Cambridge. Plans have been made to create an art museum and gallery in her honor in the carriage house behind the Agassiz Community Center at 20 Sacramento Street, Cambridge.
References: Cambridge Chronicle, May 27, 1999; Oral Interview with Maud Morgan, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution; (Microfilm of her scrapbooks are also held at the Smithsonian); Maud Morgan, Maud’s Journey: A Life From Art.( Berkeley, New Earth Publications) 1995. http://www.agassiz.org/MaudMorganArtsCenter.asp

Kay (Johnston) Morrison (b. 1898 in Nova Scotia, d. 1989)
Secretary and business manager to Robert Frost
     Kathleen (Kay) (Johnston) Morrison was born in Nova Scotia ca 1900. She was raised in Philadelphia where she attended Miss Hill’s school. She did her undergraduate work at Bryn-Mawr College where she was editor and chief of the student paper. She met Robert Frost in 1918 at the college and invited him to lecture there when she was a senior in 1920.
     After college Kay married Theodore (Ted) Morrison who was an English and Creative Writing professor at Harvard University from 1931 to 1963. The Morrisons originally lived on Mason Street in Cambridge. (Parini, p. 303.) In approximately 1939, they moved to a house on Walker Street in Cambridge. (Parini p. 328.)
     Kay again met Robert Frost when a colleague of Ted’s, Bernard DeVoto, brought Frost into the Harvard circle and the Cambridge area. Robert Frost and the Morrisons became close friends. Kay, Ted and Robert Frost continued their friendship throughout their lifetime. It is said they “made up a family of sorts.” (Parini, 315).
     In 1938, Robert Frost engaged Kay as his secretary, business manager and typist. Kay found working for Frost to be a full-time job and she quit her part-time job as a reader at the Atlantic Monthly Press. Frost comments that Kay was one of four essential connections in his life. (Parini, p. 353.)
     Ted Morrison was Director of the Bread Loaf Writers’ conference at Middlebury College from 1932 – 1955. In the summer of 1939, Frost purchased the Homer Nobel Farm in Ripton, Vermont close to the College. During the summers, Robert Frost would reside in the cabin on the farm and the Morrison’s would stay in the farm’s main house.
     Robert Frost held Kay in special regard. “The Silken Tent” is believed by many to have been written for her. It has been documented that “Never Again would Birds’ Songs Be the Same” was written for her. The book of poems, A Witness Tree, which won Robert Frost the Pulitzer Prize in 1943, is dedicated to “K.M. for her part in it.’’
     The Morrison’s lost their son, Robert, in a car accident in 1955. (Books and Writers, 2002.) Kay’s husband Theodore passed away in Amherst, MA in 1988 leaving her with her daughter, Anne Smyth, four grandchildren and two great grandchildren. (New York Times, 1988.)
References:
Books and Writers website, Robert (Lee) Frost (1874-1963). 2002. Found on May 31, 2008 at http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/rfrost.htm.
Faggen, R. (2001). The Cambridge Companion to Robert Frost. University Press, Cambridge, UK. Found on May 15, 2008 at http://books.google.com/books?id=ApVwkZqt6uwC&printsec=copyright&dq=faggen+the+cambridge+companion+to+robert+frost
Parini, J. (1999). Robert Frost: a life. Fistzhenry & Whiteside Ltd., Markham, Ontario.
New York Times Obituary, 11/29/1988. “Theodore Morrison, poet and professor, 87”. Found on May 15, 2008 at
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=940DE0DA143FF93AA15752C1A96E948260
Seymour, M. (1996). “Stopping by woods for seduction”, New York Times article published May 19, 1996, found on May 15, 2008 at http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9C07EFD91339F93AA25756C0A960958260
Tuten, Nancy Lewis and John Zubizarreta, editors. Robert Frost Encyclopedia. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2001. Found online at http://books.google.com/books?id=RjZuWeTJpAkC&pg=PA466&lpg=PA466&dq=Robert+Frost+Encyclopedia+Tuten+Zubizarreta

Phylis (Hagen) Morrison (b. May 6, 1927, d. July 9, 2002)
Artist, teacher, science writer
Phylis Morrison was born Phylis Hagen. She married and had one son, Bert Singer, but the marriage did not last. Self taught as an artist and weaver, she began to teach others, becoming convinced that art and science were the same. In 1960, she published a book on crystals with Alan Holden for the Science Study series. In 1965 she met the distinguished physicist and peace activist Philip Morrison at an education program connected with MIT. The two married and became an inseparable couple. When he began to serve Scientific American as book editor, Phylis joined him in reviewing children’s science books for thirty-five years. She also worked with him on the NOVA series “Powers of Ten” for PBS, and worked on the book that arose from that series. The two also collaborated on a later NOVA series “The Ring of Truth” that aired in 1987, also published as a book. She received the Wheeler prize with her husband from the Boston Museum of Science. She died of cancer in 2002. After Philip Morrison’s death in 2005, a website was set up to bring together recollections of the couple.
References: Dennis Overbye “Philip Morrison, 89, Builder of First Atom Bomb, Dies” NY Times, April 26, 2005; www.memoriesofmorrison.org/Aboutthissite.htm