Thomas, Martha Carey

Thomas, Martha Carey, 1857–1935, American educator and feminist, b. Baltimore, grad. Cornell, 1877, studied at Johns Hopkins and at Leipzig, the Sorbonne, and Zürich (Ph.D., 1882). In 1884 she was appointed to organize Bryn Mawr College for women, serving as dean and professor of English until 1894 and as president from 1894 to 1922. She also established the summer school for women in industry at Bryn Mawr in 1921. A leader in the woman-suffrage movement, she was president of the National Collegiate Equal Suffrage League from 1906 to 1913. Her works include The Higher Education of Women (1900).

See biographies by E. Finch (1947) and H. L. Horowitz (1994).

The Columbia Electronic Encyclopedia, 6th ed. Copyright © 2024, Columbia University Press. All rights reserved.

See more Encyclopedia articles on: Education: Biographies