![\"Alexandra](\"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/files\/2020\/03\/200311_College_Store_Great_Day_0173.jpg\")
<\/a><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\nBates senior Alexandra Cullen, a Bates Communications student assistant \u2014 and an accomplished Bates woman in her own right \u2014 did much of the research on this story.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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Mary W. Mitchell, Class of 1869<\/h5>\n\n\n\n1846\u20131898<\/h6>\n\n\n\n
Indefatigable first female graduate of Bates<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n Mary Mitchell was the first female graduate of Bates College, a member of the Class of 1869. Born in 1846 in Dover-Foxcroft, Maine, she was remembered as independent and resourceful, working in the Lewiston cotton mills to pay her way through college and help her family.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Offered a scholarship by Bates founder Oren Cheney, Mitchell famously turned it down: \u201cI cannot take that, Mr. Cheney. Give it to the brethren. I can take care of myself.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n Though Bates was open to women from its beginning, the reality of coeducation was slow to arrive. The initial 14 Bates graduates, in 1867 and 1868, were men. Eight women were non-graduates in that span.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Resistance to women came from inside the college and outside.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Bates President George Colby Chase, Class of 1868, later wrote that \u201csome of those in authority had a subtle influence upon them to the effect that they began to regard themselves as out of place in college.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Cheney observed that his college, in order to become the first coed college in New England, would have \u201cto brave the criticisms from other institutions because of what would be called an erratic course.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Indeed, as Tim Larson \u201805 notes in his senior honors thesis, Faith By Their Works<\/em>, \u201cAll male colleges, such as Bowdoin, used the early female graduates of Bates as a means of de-legitimizing the school during this period.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n After graduation, Mitchell taught school in Worcester, Mass., and then, in 1876, became a professor of Latin at Vassar College. She later opened a school for girls in Boston before teaching school in New Hampshire. She was married to Frank Birchall.<\/p>\n\n\n\n At Bates, the residence Mitchell House, at 250 College St., is named for her.<\/p>\n\n\n\n A trailblazing Western woman of many firsts<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n An American woman, especially a suffragist, who tried to rock society\u2019s boat in the 19th century got a label: \u201ca dangerous woman.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Meet Bates\u2019 most dangerous woman, Ella Knowles, Class of 1884<\/a> \u2014 a suffragist, trailblazing and highly successful lawyer, and career boat-rocker whose life was a succession of singular female accomplishments.<\/p>\n\n\n At Bates, she was the first woman:<\/p>\n\n\n\n After Bates, she moved to Montana, where she was the first American woman:<\/p>\n\n\n\n In 1892, Knowles was nominated by the Populist Party to run for attorney general of Montana, only the second woman in American history to be nominated for that office.<\/p>\n\n\n\n On the campaign trail, she became well-known for her rousing rhetoric in support of women\u2019s rights. She said to one audience:<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cDegrade woman, cripple her faculties, hamper her intellectual growth, and the result is a degraded, crippled, or enslaved people. [But] elevate woman, give her full freedom to use the faculties God has given her, not as a matter of favor, but as an act of simple justice [and the] result is a people strong and self-reliant, intellectual, and valiant.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n She moved the New England suffrage movement forward<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n Mary N. Chase, Class of 1887, was a leading figure in the women\u2019s suffrage movement and post\u2013World War I campaigns for international peace.<\/p>\n\n\n At Bates, Chase won a scholarship through a declamation contest. She taught school for several years after graduation, but by the turn of the 20th century had become involved in the burgeoning suffrage movement. She organized for the National Woman Suffrage Association and led the New Hampshire Woman Suffrage Association.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Chase put her oratory skills to good use in her activism, speaking at hundreds of local chapters of the Grange, a national agricultural movement that had become an engine of progressive politics.<\/p>\n\n\n\n She garnered support for an amendment to remove the word \u201cmale\u201d from the voting rights section of the New Hampshire Constitution.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Chase later worked at Proctor Academy in Andover, N.H., and, as she wrote in 1921, used \u201cInternational Correspondence to promote International Good Will.\u201d In the wake of the ravages of World War I, she had her students write letters to their counterparts in Mexico, Japan, and Germany, among other countries.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cAlready I feel more than repaid for the anxious hours and the hard labor I have put into this endeavor to help heal the wounds of war through the blessed \u2018ministry of reconciliation,\u2019\u201d she wrote.<\/p>\n\n\n\n One of Bates\u2019 first female trustees and a national leader of an organization supporting disadvantaged women<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n An advocate for disadvantaged women and their children, Mary Brackett Robertson, Class of 1890, twice served as president of the Florence Crittenton Home for Girls in Washington, D.C.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The home was part of a national mission founded in the late 19th century by Charles Crittenton and Dr. Kate Waller Barrett. (Today the organization is known as National Crittenton.)<\/p>\n\n\n Robertson served as president of the so-called Lady Managers of the Washington home from 1916 to 1921 and again from 1923 to at least 1933. She was instrumental in \u201cdeveloping the [facility] into a model institution,\u201d wrote Otto Wilson in a history of the Crittenton homes. Robertson was also influential in the national organization.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In 1937, the Mary B. Robertson Fund was established \u201cto ensure that no girl or woman would ever be turned away from the home because she lacked money to pay for its services,\u201d Martha Fletcher \u201928 reported in the Bates Alumnus<\/em>. \u201cMrs. Robertson rates this as the highest honor she has received.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Robertson was the daughter of the Rev. Nathan Cook Brackett, a minister of New England\u2019s Free Will Baptist Church and the founder and first president of Storer College, a Historically Black College in West Virginia.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In 1916, Robertson was appointed president of the College Women’s Club of Washington, forerunner of the American Association of University Women. She became one of Bates\u2019 first two women trustees in 1917 (the other was Mrs. Scott Wilson, Class of 1891, also appointed in 1917).<\/p>\n\n\n\n Bates\u2019 first female Black graduate, educator, National Society for Black Physicists member<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n A member of the Class of 1897, Stella James was Bates\u2019 first Black female graduate. The year she graduated, she wrote eloquently in The<\/em> Bates Student<\/em> of the manifold significance of Harpers Ferry, W.Va. This geological wonder, she writes, is a Gibraltar-like formation \u201clying somewhere between the present and the past.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n And she refers to John Brown\u2019s historic 1859 uprising there, intended to bring on abolition \u2014 \u201cthe first blow against slavery, and at Charlestown its first martyr was tried and hung.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n James had already earned a degree from a teacher\u2019s school in Harpers Ferry, Storer Normal School, before coming to Bates, earning second honor in physics (students did not major in subjects as we know it today).<\/p>\n\n\n\n Linking the schools was Bates founder Oren Cheney, who encouraged Maine philanthropist John Storer to make a $10,000 gift that enabled an erstwhile Harpers Ferry primary school to evolve into a college to train much-needed Black teachers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n James would marry another Storer graduate, Robert P. Sims, and they raised six children. She taught science and physics at Storer, Virginia Seminary, and finally at Bluefield State College, where her husband was president.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Her writings, whether on Harpers Ferry or the value of manual labor<\/a> and the need for its instruction at a public school level (\u201c…we want our school training to bear some relation to the probable life work of all\u201d) are remarkable in their clarity, precision and boldly practical thinking. She retired to a farm in Pennsylvania, where she lived to be 88. Her grave is in Harpers Ferry.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Physician and medical researcher who fought infectious diseases<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n Josephine B. Neal, Class of 1901, was a medical doctor and infectious disease expert who researched encephalitis, meningitis, and perhaps most notably, infantile paralysis, later known as polio.<\/p>\n\n\n Neal studied physics at Bates and after graduation was listed in The Bates Student <\/em>among fewer than a dozen faculty members as a \u201cphysics assistant.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n She worked as a teacher to pay her way through medical school at Cornell. Several years later she moved to New York City and joined Columbia University\u2019s College of Physicians and Surgeons as a clinical professor of neurology.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Neal authored many academic studies and wrote the book The Clinical Study of Encephalitis, <\/em>as well as chapters on meningitis in two widely used medical textbooks.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Through the New York City health department, she worked on the front lines fighting polio in the 1920s and \u201930s, a time when the disease was a pandemic in North America. In 1934, she was one of a few physicians to receive an experimental polio inoculation (an effective polio vaccine was still years away).<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cWe cannot yet prevent the disease, nor have we found a cure, but we do know a great deal about treating the victims,\u201d Neal told an interviewer in 1938, the year funds raised at a birthday party for Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who had been disabled by the disease, helped establish a polio foundation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Among Neal\u2019s many honors were a 1926 honorary degree from Bates and, in recognition of her work on encephalitis, the Elizabeth Blackwell Citation from the New York Infirmary for Women and Children.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Wielded her legal expertise for social betterment<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n Daughter of a Maine state attorney general, and one of three siblings renowned for their legal accomplishments, Dora Shaw Heffner, Class of 1906, reached the epitome of her career during her time as head of California’s Department of Mental Hygiene.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Appointed to the position by Gov. Earl Warren in 1943, Heffner supervised all state institutions for the mentally ill and developmentally disabled.<\/p>\n\n\n \u201cShe believes that mental illness should be treated with care and intelligence and not be looked upon as a shame and disgrace,\u201d wrote Lucile Foulger \u201932 in a Bates Alumnus<\/em> profile.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Heffner was especially effective at attracting state funding for her department, winning support for new facilities and for bolstering professional staff at existing institutions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n A product of her time, Heffner sought to roll back, not eliminate, compulsory sterilization of certain patients. Yet she did seek \u201ca more scientifically informed and democratic approach to institutionalized care [and] created some latitude for patient communication and appeal,\u201d writes Alexandra Minna Stern in the study Eugenic Nation<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Heffner served as a judge in the Los Angeles juvenile court and as commissioner of the state Superior Court for Los Angeles County. She helped organize and run the local Legal Aid Clinic Association, and served as president of the Los Angeles Crittenton Home, part of a national support network for disadvantaged women.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Bates awarded Heffner an honorary degree in 1940. In 1945, she christened the Victory Ship Bates Victory<\/em>, named for the college.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Helped refugees flee Nazi persecution during World War II<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n Elisabeth Anthony Dexter, Class of 1908, organized relief and visa assistance for Jewish refugees fleeing Europe during World War II.<\/p>\n\n\n\n A great-niece of pioneering feminist Susan B. Anthony, Dexter earned a doctorate in history from Clark University and became a well-respected social historian. She wrote a book on women in business during the U.S. Colonial period.<\/p>\n\n\n But in the late 1930s, Dexter and her husband, Robert, were attentive to more-contemporary concerns as persecution of Jews by the Nazis in Germany, Austria, and Czechoslovakia was mounting.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Elisabeth and Robert, a leader in the Unitarian church, moved to Portugal to run the Unitarian (now Unitarian Universalist) Service Committee, which helped a growing number of refugees through social assistance, American visa sponsorship, and underground escape routes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Over the course of the war, Elisabeth Dexter became the committee\u2019s European director \u2014 and was even recruited by the U.S. Office of Strategic Services as a spy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n One of the people the Dexters helped immigrate to the United States was Hans Subak, whose daughter Susan later wrote a book about the work of the Unitarian Service Committee<\/a>. The Dexters also tried to bring over Hans Subak\u2019s parents, but they were unsuccessful. \u201cA sense of guilt sat heavily on them for a long time and was never entirely lifted,\u201d Susan Subak wrote.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Classicist who contributed to our understanding of Greek slavery and athletics<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n Through teaching, Rachel Sargent Robinson, Class of 1914, funded her bachelor\u2019s degree at Bates and then her doctorate at the University of Illinois. Her dissertation on Greek slavery won her a fellowship to conduct research in Greece.<\/p>\n\n\n\n She worked as a university professor before marrying another classical scholar, Rodney Potter Robinson; they were fixtures at the University of Cincinnati and the American Academy in Rome.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Rachel Robinson continued her scholarship, publishing the oft-cited Sources for the History of Greek Athletics.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n After her husband died, Robinson returned to teaching at several universities while working on a comprehensive study of Greek and Roman athletics.<\/p>\n\n\n \u201cShe regarded each meeting of a class as a performance for which she prepared as if she were the protagonist in a continuing drama,\u201d a University of Cincinnati colleague wrote after Robinson\u2019s death in 1977.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cHer students responded to her own love of learning and enthusiasm for all things of the mind.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Missionary who established schools and libraries in India, as well as fostering entrepreneurship<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n Born in Raymond, Maine, Florence Hooper Moulton, Class of 1915, played hockey at Bates, majored in Latin and history, and graduated with her future husband, Joseph Langdon Moulton.<\/p>\n\n\n They were Congregationalists, and a desire to serve brought them to India as missionaries in 1919. And there they stayed, Florence leaving only shortly before her death, in 1956. They were members of the American Board of Foreign Missions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Their primary assignment in India was to establish and run schools and libraries, as well as fighting famine and improving living conditions. That included helping foster a textile business, the Sisal Fibre Institute, producing sisal products made from hemp.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Moulton was one of many missionaries who helped promote these products within India to foreign customers, but after the partition of 1947, separating India and Pakistan into two countries, that business collapsed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Stepping in as director, she worked to develop a market for the sisal products among Congregationalists and others back in the U.S. By 1953, as her husband recalled in Faith for the Future<\/em>, his history of the mission, \u201corders were coming thick and fast.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Florence Hooper dedicated her life to others, and had four daughters in the midst of that service. Three of them were Bates graduates: the late Marjorie Moulton Perkins \u201941, the late Barbara Moulton Scott \u201944, and Margrett J. Moulton \u201951.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Attained wide acclaim in the mid-20th century as a prize-winning author of children’s books<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n An academic librarian who for a time was head of circulation for the American Library in Paris, Hazel Hutchins Wilson, Class of 1919, made her name as a children’s book author in 1939 with The Red Dory<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n Writing into the early 1970s and amassing a catalog of some 20 titles, Wilson visited a variety of genres, including biography (The Story of Lafayette<\/em>) and geography (The Seine: River of Paris<\/em>). Several of her books, including The Red Dory<\/em>, The Owen Boys<\/em>, Tall Ships<\/em>, and Island Summer<\/em>, were set in Maine, her native state.<\/p>\n\n\n\n But her most popular books were the Herbert<\/em> series, about a character based on Wilson’s son, Jerome. Herbert was a well-meaning 10-year-old with a knack for getting into mischief.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cHerbert usually does things to excess, with his family egging him on, since his mother told him that discouraging children is a bad idea!\u201d Wilson’s publisher, Alfred A. Knopf, noted in publicity materials.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Wilson received a variety of accolades for her writing, including the Boys\u2019 Clubs of America Junior Book Award for Thad Owen<\/em> and the 1955 New York Herald Tribune<\/em> Spring Book Festival Honor Award for Herbert<\/em>. Bates awarded Wilson an honorary master of arts degree in 1956.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Wilson also taught courses about children’s literature in the 1950s at George Washington University, where she was a lecturer, and reviewed books for the Washington Evening Star<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n First Greek-American woman to go away to college, lifetime supporter of Bates<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n Her life began in Larissa, Greece, in 1903 and ended, nearly a full century later, in America. In between, Euterpe Boukis Dukakis ’25 blazed a trail for immigrants, becoming the first Greek-American woman to attend a U.S. college away from home. <\/p>\n\n\n\n A brilliant and diligent student who came to Bates from Haverhill, Mass., where her immigrant family settled, she engaged in extracurricular activities, earned membership in Phi Beta Kappa, and remained loyal to Bates her entire life, establishing in 1994 the endowed Euterpe B. Dukakis Professorship in Classical and Medieval Studies. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Her success led the way for other Bates students from immigrant families; the late Trustee emerita Helen Papaioanou ’49 recalls, as a student, briefly meeting Dukakis and her husband, Panos ’22: <\/p>\n\n\n\n “She said to me, ‘We are proud of you!’ In that moment, there was an acknowledgment of connectedness, of heritage, experience, struggles, dreams and aspirations.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n In her mid-80s, the woman her classmates nicknamed “Zippy” proved again her intellect and mettle, campaigning for her son, Michael, the 1988 Democratic nominee for president. She flew to events around the country, spoke to senior-citizen groups and sat for media interviews. <\/p>\n\n\n\n She once said about growing old, “Get my body, but don’t take my curiosity,” and, in Greek, she expressed love for her family this way: “I love you. I love you, like my own two eyes.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n New York City arts patron also committed to music at Bates <\/span><\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n The day before leaving the farming community of Thomaston, Conn., for Lewiston, Alice Swanson Esty \u201925 called a high school mentor. \u201cI’m $25 short. I can’t get there,\u201d she told the teacher. He supplied the necessary funds; for Esty, it proved to an unforgettable act of kindness and philanthropy.<\/p>\n\n\n After graduation from Bates, Esty moved to New York City to pursue a performing arts career. She worked with influential directors Lee Strasberg and Harold Clurman and with the avant-garde Provincetown Players, ultimately appearing on Broadway in Come of Age<\/em> with Judith Anderson and L\u2019Aiglon<\/em> with Ethel Barrymore.<\/p>\n\n\n\n While marriage to William C. Esty, founder of the eponymous advertising agency, transformed her from struggling artist to patron of the arts, she continued to pursue an interest she had gained at Bates, studying voice with Juilliard teacher Florence Kimball Paige.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Esty established the college\u2019s Alice Swanson Esty Professorship in Music in 1997 and gave Bates valuable books, manuscripts, and musical scores she had commissioned and performed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Supporting music at Bates, said Esty, \u201cis going to make better musicians whether they go on with their big careers or have a smaller career. If students have the opportunity to study music along with their other studies, they would have an actually better life.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n In 1984 she received an honorary Doctor of Humane Letters degree from Bates \u201cin gratitude for her example of generous and bold patronage of the arts and artists, but even more in celebration of her gifts of song and her grace of self.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Prominent and prolific author, playwright, and social justice advocate<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cFlimflammery\u201d is how writer Dorothy Clarke Wilson \u201925 described the scene in The Ten Commandments<\/em> where Moses, played by Charleton Heston, parts the Red Sea. She would know: Her novel about the early life of Moses, The Prince of Egypt<\/em>, which earned the Westminster Award for Fiction in 1948, was a key source for Cecil B. DeMille\u2019s 1956 Hollywood epic.<\/p>\n\n\n Wilson was one of three writers from her class to attain national prominence, the others being Erwin Canham, editor of the Christian Science Monitor<\/em>, and novelist Gladys Hasty Carroll.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Bates Magazine<\/em> obituary writer Christine Terp Madsen \u201973 wrote that Wilson<\/a> \u201ccombined the urge and talent to write, a deep faith, and an intense concern for social justice\u201d in all her work.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Wilson wrote some 70 plays on religious themes and more than 30 books in various genres. In 1949, stated the Bangor Daily News<\/em>, \u201cshe was recognized as having more plays in production than any other playwright in the world.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Wilson wrote what she called \u201cnovelized biographies\u201d about prominent women, including Dr. Elizabeth Blackwell (the first woman granted an M.D. in this country), Martha Custis Washington, Abraham Lincoln\u2019s mother and stepmother, and the two wives of Theodore Roosevelt. She also wrote several books about people with profound disabilities.<\/p>\n\n\n\n She received a Doctor of Letters degree from Bates in 1947, and a Doctor of Humane Letters degree from the University of Maine in 1984.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Author of a best-selling novel that immortalized a rural Maine culture<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n Daughter of a close-knit family living on a Maine farm, Gladys Hasty Carroll \u201925 parlayed this upbringing into literary stardom in 1933 with the publication of As the Earth Turns.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n A Book-of-the-Month selection and Pulitzer nominee, the novel brought readers through a year in the life of a family in Dunnybrook, based on a hamlet in the author’s hometown, South Berwick.<\/p>\n\n\n Carroll’s best-seller \u201cis a highly regarded evocation of an era that is rapidly fading from living memory,\u201d wrote a Portland Press Herald<\/em> reporter. \u201cAt the heart of the work lies a dignity and resilience in the face of change that…[Carroll] always defended as an accurate portrayal of a life she had seen and lived.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Though she never again enjoyed the level of success she earned with As the Earth Turns<\/em>, Carroll continued to write into the 1970s, completing 26 books of fiction and nonfiction, including short stories and children\u2019s books.<\/p>\n\n\n\n She received an honorary degree from Bates in 1945 and served on the Board of Overseers from 1950 to 1955. The University of Maine presented her with the 1995 Maryann Hartman Award, recognizing exemplary \u201cspirit, achievement, and zest for life\u201d among Maine women.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Launched a greeting card company that ultimately attracted millions of customers worldwide<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n Though she was known as a Bates student for her musical accomplishments, it was in the realm of commercial art and publishing that Priscilla Lunderville \u201929 found her greatest success.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Teaching in small towns for a few years after Bates, she \u201cdiscovered she had a latent talent for designing greeting cards,\u201d Reginald Colby \u201931 wrote in a 1949 Bates Alumnus<\/em> profile of Lunderville.<\/p>\n\n\n \u201cA happier discovery was that people would buy them. She left the teaching profession and, starting with a few hard-drawn cards for friends and acquaintances, soon interested a local printing firm in producing several thousand copies of a few designs to retail for five cents.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Her designs, which emphasized bold colors and traditional imagery, had a broad appeal that drew a rapidly increasing audience. Launching her business, titled Workshop Cards by Priscilla Lunderville, in her hometown of Littleton, N.H., Lunderville quickly found herself needing more space and more employees to meet demand.<\/p>\n\n\n Later incorporated as Workshop Cards Inc., with Lunderville as president, the firm’s reach expanded nationally and beyond. \u201cThe cards flow out to buyers through some 1,600 accounts in 42 states, South Africa, Alaska and Hawaii,\u201d Colby pointed out.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Lunderville didn’t forget Bates. As Colby divulged in his profile, Workshop’s \u201cNotables\u201d line of made-to-order designs for stationery included images of the College Chapel and could be purchased in the College Store.<\/p>\n\n\n\n A lifetime dedicated to social and civic betterment<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n In her long life, Mildred Beckman Myhrman \u201930 compiled an enviable record of social work and public service.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Along with volunteer work for diverse service organizations, that record includes four years as chair of the Disaster Committee of the Lewiston-Auburn Red Cross and time as a psychiatric social worker with the Androscoggin County Mental Health Association and other mental health services.<\/p>\n\n\n A magna cum laude graduate of Bates, Mildred Beckman earned a master\u2019s degree in social work from Western Reserve School of Applied Social Services in 1934. In Ohio, she was a caseworker for the Cleveland Family Service Society and held various positions with a county relief administration.<\/p>\n\n\n\n She returned to Lewiston in 1935, married Bates sociology professor Anders Myhrman, and taught sociology at the college as a part-time or occasional instructor until 1948.<\/p>\n\n\n\n From 1957 to 1964, Mildred served the College as a trustee. She and Anders were two of the four people celebrated by Richard Swett when he endowed an award recognizing outstanding sociology theses at Bates. The Myhrman \/ Swett Award honors Swett\u2019s aunt and uncle, Mildred and Anders; and his parents, Robert Swett \u201933 and Muriel Beckman Swett \u201930, Mildred\u2019s twin.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Of the twins \u2014 known on campus as \u201cMu\u201d and \u201cMid\u201d \u2014 the 1930 Mirror<\/em> noted, \u201cEven now, we can\u2019t always tell one from the other. It\u2019s rumored that \u2018Mu\u2019 sang in choir one morning and no one knew the difference.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n The unsung hero of Ladd Library<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n Iva Foster \u201930 succeeded another Bates alumna, the esteemed Mabel Eaton, Class of 1910, as Bates librarian. Eaton herself made significant contributions to Bates \u2014 she founded the women\u2019s honor society College Key, which would later be merged with the men\u2019s Bates Club.<\/p>\n\n\n\n And while Foster\u2019s tenure as librarian was shorter than Eaton\u2019s 36 years, she was in charge when Bates tackled one of its most complex and significant building projects: a new library.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cIva was the unsung hero\u201d of the Ladd Library project, said Bernie Carpenter, treasurer emeritus, in a Bates oral history. \u201cShe was so sweet, and at the same time hard as nails.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n Helping to develop a program for the new library, Foster first evaluated the current collection and space.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cIva went to work and measured all of the linear footage of shelving there was for books in every discipline,” said Carpenter. “She had a yardstick that she ran around with, this 3-foot stick, measuring everything.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Then she hit the road. \u201cShe traveled all over New England and made these long lists of things that had<\/em> to be considered,\u201d Carpenter said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Most important, she asked Bates to make hard decisions about possible building features and amenities \u2014 \u201cto determine if they were not as necessary for us as for somebody else, or if they did need to be in our new building, to ensure that we didn’t build something that was smaller than we’d have to have.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cIva would sit in with all the meetings with the contractors and through the bidding process, and she was right there with a hard hat on, right along with the rest of us.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n The building team was asked to look 20 years into the future. Now, a half-century later, Foster\u2019s work is still paying off.<\/p>\n\n\n\n University professor, Jungian therapist, and part of the founding of the New College of Florida<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n Marion Crosby Hoppin \u201932 was a Bates debater, a psychologist, and a forward-looking college administrator who helped found the New College of Florida. \u201cHer great strength as a woman was a great, welcoming tolerance,\u201d Hoppin\u2019s obituary in <\/span>Bates Magazine <\/span><\/i>quotes a colleague as saying. <\/span><\/p>\n\n\n Hoppin majored in English at Bates and earned a master\u2019s degree in the subject before pivoting to psychology, earning a doctorate from Columbia. She and her husband, noted film animator Courtland Hector Hoppin, studied under Carl Jung in Switzerland. She was a Bates trustee for 10 years.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n Hoppin worked as a professor and administrator at Hunter College and Carleton College before she and her husband moved to Florida, where they got involved with a group planning the establishment of a liberal arts college. <\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n The community of the nascent New College of Florida was incomplete without Hoppin, \u201ca beacon of light in a long gown and surrounded by a cloud of Pekingese dogs,\u201d reads Hoppin\u2019s obituary in the New College\u2019s alumni magazine. <\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n At the college, she taught Jungian psychoanalysis, existentialism, and mythology, and she founded the C. G. Jung Society in Sarasota. A swimming pool at the News College that she funded is named for her; an endowed chair in the Department of Asian Studies is also named after her.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n Pioneering African American librarian<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n Marjorie Arlington Anderson spent her early years in Connecticut and moved to Lewiston at about the age of 10. She lived close to the Bates campus, at 56 Elm St., where her stepfather, George A. Ross, Class of 1904, ran a famous local ice cream parlor.<\/p>\n\n\n At Bates, she majored in English, played soccer, and was known as the girl with the \u201cinfectious giggle.\u201d After graduation she earned a degree in library science from Simmons College in 1934.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Her first job as a librarian was at an all-Black preparatory school in North Carolina, called the Palmer Memorial Institute (now defunct).<\/p>\n\n\n\n In 1937 the Columbia Civic Library Association published a slim directory (31 pages) of all the black librarians with degrees from accredited library schools: Marjorie Arlington was listed as only the fourth Black graduate of Simmons\u2019 library program.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Citing the directory as the first of its kind, the authors offered it with the hope that it would serve a definite need for \u201clibrary service to all.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n From there Marjorie Arlington moved to New York. She married Carl C. Anderson in 1941. She worked at the New York Public Library for 31 years, working as a children\u2019s librarian, filling a definite need.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Educational leader and champion of her home town of Lewiston<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n One of the most highly engaged civic leaders of her era in Lewiston-Auburn, Geneva Kirk \u201937 was once asked what inspired her service. \u201cBates College,\u201d she said. \u201cThe professors kept reminding us that if you had a good education you owed it to society to return some of that.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n A Lewiston native who lived near campus at 30 Ware St. most of her life, Kirk was a career educator who taught at Lewiston High School from 1948 to 1979. She served as president of the Maine Teachers Association and the Maine Retired Teachers Association.<\/p>\n\n\n She began teaching at a time when married women were actively discouraged from the profession, she recalled in a Bates oral history.<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cMarried women couldn\u2019t teach. [Schools] wouldn\u2019t hire them \u2014 the city didn\u2019t want to support families. We always had sufficient teachers and perfectly well-qualified teachers, but women felt badly that they couldn\u2019t stay on after they were married.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Kirk served innumerable nonprofits and professional organizations. She was particularly active with the United Way, whose annual volunteer award is named The Geneva Kirk Award for Community Service. Kirk received an honorary Doctor of Laws degree from Bates in 1993.<\/p>\n\n\n\n National leader and advocate for libraries<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n A member of the Armenian immigrant community of Haverhill, Mass., and the youngest of 10 children, Saranush \u201cSara\u201d Jaffarian \u201937 began her librarian career in the public schools of Quincy, Mass.<\/p>\n\n\n\n She later served as the director of libraries for the Greensboro, N.C., public schools and the supervisor of libraries for the Seattle public schools.<\/p>\n\n\n In 1961, Jaffarian returned to Massachusetts to take charge of revising the public school libraries in Lexington.<\/p>\n\n\n\n She held numerous leadership positions with the American Library Association, which sponsors the Sara Jaffarian School Library Program Award, a $5,000 prize for \u201cexemplary programming in the humanities.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Jaffarian majored in history and government at Bates and earned a library science degree at Simmons College.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cIn order to have an excellent school, there must be an excellent school library!\u201d she said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cTo achieve this, more is needed than just books and other materials \u2014 curriculum-related programming has the power to take a school library to the next level, exciting students, bringing in parents, and getting the attention of administrators and community leaders.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n The pediatric “fairy godmother” of Arlington, Mass.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n A longtime pediatrician and mainstay of the Armenian community of Greater Boston, Dr. Elizabeth Gregory \u201938 once said that \u201cBates is where my life began. Before that I was the daughter of my parents \u2014 helped, nourished, directed, encouraged, pushed by them. At Bates, I became an individual who recognized my own ambitions and abilities and knew where I wanted to go.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Bates Magazine<\/em> obituary editor Christine Terp Madsen \u201973 began Gregory\u2019s obituary this way: \u201cBetty Gregory, the oldest child of parents who fled the murderous hands of Turks intent on wiping out the Armenians among them, never forgot that heritage, that genocide, that sacrifice.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Gregory\u2019s father, a teacher in Armenia who became a shoe factory manager in Lewiston, put three of his four children through college and graduate school.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Gregory was accepted into Boston University\u2019s medical school \u201cat a time when it was strongly suspected that such studies would shrivel women\u2019s internal organs,\u201d Madsen wrote.<\/p>\n\n\n In 1998, one of Gregory\u2019s former patients, Elizabeth Meade \u201900, by then a Bates student (whose own parents had been childhood patients of Gregory\u2019s), posed with Gregory for a photograph at Bates. <\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n Said Meade, \u201cDr. Gregory\u2019s name was brought up so often in my house when I was growing up. When I saw her again at Bates, everything that I had heard about her was confirmed: She was extremely vibrant and witty. With her incredible energy and obvious zest for life, Dr. Gregory could easily keep up with students at Bates today!\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Preserving and continuing a family history of resistance to racism and slavery<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n Ellen \u201cKaye\u201d Craft Dammond \u201938 proudly traced her ancestry back to her great-grandparents.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<\/a>
\n\n\n\nElla Knowles, Class of 1884<\/h5>\n\n\n\n
1860\u00ad\u20131911<\/h6>\n\n\n\n
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\n
\n\n\n\nMary N. Chase, Class of 1887<\/h5>\n\n\n\n
1864\u20131959<\/h6>\n\n\n\n
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\n\n\n\nMary Brackett Robertson, Class of 1890<\/h5>\n\n\n\n
1868\u20131962<\/h6>\n\n\n\n
<\/a>
\n\n\n\nStella James Sims, Class of 1897<\/h5>\n\n\n\n
1875\u20131963<\/h6>\n\n\n\n
<\/a>
\n\n\n\nJosephine B. Neal, Class of 1901<\/h5>\n\n\n\n
1880\u20131955<\/h6>\n\n\n\n
<\/a>
\n\n\n\nDora Shaw Heffner, Class of 1906<\/h5>\n\n\n\n
1885\u20131957<\/h6>\n\n\n\n
<\/a>
\n\n\n\nElisabeth Anthony Dexter, Class of 1908<\/h5>\n\n\n\n
1887\u20131972<\/h6>\n\n\n\n
<\/a>
\n\n\n\nRachel Sargent Robinson, Class of 1914<\/h5>\n\n\n\n
1891\u20131977<\/h6>\n\n\n\n
<\/a><\/a><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n
\n\n\n\nFlorence Hooper Moulton, Class of 1915<\/h5>\n\n\n\n
1894\u20131956<\/h6>\n\n\n\n
<\/a>
\n\n\n\nHazel Hutchins Wilson, Class of 1919<\/h5>\n\n\n\n
1898\u20131992<\/h6>\n\n\n\n
<\/a>
\n\n\n\nEuterpe Boukis Dukakis, Class of 1925<\/h5>\n\n\n\n
1903\u20132003<\/h6>\n\n\n\n
\n\n\n\nAlice Swanson Esty, Class of 1925<\/h5>\n\n\n\n
1904\u20132000<\/h6>\n\n\n\n
<\/a>
\n\n\n\nDorothy Clarke Wilson, Class of 1925<\/h5>\n\n\n\n
1904\u20132003<\/h6>\n\n\n\n
<\/a>
\n\n\n\nGladys Hasty Carroll, Class of 1925<\/h5>\n\n\n\n
1904\u20131999<\/h6>\n\n\n\n
<\/a><\/a>
\n\n\n\nPriscilla Lunderville, Class of 1929<\/h5>\n\n\n\n
1907\u20131985<\/h6>\n\n\n\n
<\/a><\/a>
\n\n\n\nMildred Beckman Myhrman, Class of 1930<\/strong><\/h5>\n\n\n\n
1909\u20132001<\/h6>\n\n\n\n
<\/a>
\n\n\n\nIva W. Foster, Class of 1930<\/h5>\n\n\n\n
1909\u20131991<\/h6>\n\n\n\n
<\/a>
\n\n\n\nMarion Crosby Hoppin, Class of 1932<\/h5>\n\n\n\n
1905\u20131996<\/h5>\n\n\n\n
<\/a>
\n\n\n\nMarjorie Arlington Anderson, Class of 1933<\/h5>\n\n\n\n
1912\u20132009<\/h6>\n\n\n\n
<\/a>
\n\n\n\nGeneva Kirk, Class of 1937<\/h5>\n\n\n\n
1917\u20132007<\/h6>\n\n\n\n
<\/a>
\n\n\n\nSara Jaffarian, Class of 1937<\/h5>\n\n\n\n
1915\u20132013<\/h6>\n\n\n\n
<\/a>
\n\n\n\nElizabeth Gregory, Class of 1938<\/h5>\n\n\n\n
1917\u20132012<\/h6>\n\n\n\n
<\/a>
\n\n\n\nEllen Craft Dammond, Class of 1938<\/h5>\n\n\n\n
1916\u20132007<\/h6>\n\n\n\n
<\/a>