U-M graduates were key to AAUW's start

Updated 10:00 AM October 23, 2006

U-M graduates were key to AAUW's start

By Joanne Nesbit
News Service

Seven years into its organization, the American Association of University Women (AAUW) awarded its first fellowship in 1888 to Ida Street, a graduate student in education at U-M.

The $350 awarded Street was just the beginning of an education foundation that today is the largest endowment in the world providing educational support exclusively to women, a fund designed to be available in perpetuity.

When Street entered U-M there were no women on the school's faculty, and voting rights for women were more than three decades into the future. But even before she joined the University, some of its female graduates were involved deeply with AAUW; three of them were among its founders.

Now, 125 years after 17 like-minded women—all college graduates—founded the Association of Collegiate Alumnae in 1881, the organization now known as the AAUW is a network of more than 100,000 women who continue to influence and shape equity in education. This year AAUW celebrates its quasquicentennial with activities beginning on the day of its founding, Nov. 28, and continuing through June.

Among the founders of AAUW were U-M graduates Lucy Andrews, (1876), Alice Freeman (1876) and Mary Olive Marston (1877). Today more than 1,030 current AAUW members claim U-M as their alma mater.

Freeman was a country girl who taught herself to read at age 3 and began school at 4. At 17 she informed her parents that she intended "to have a college degree if it took her till she was 50 to get it." But it was not an easy route to enter the university of her choosing: U-M, the strongest of the coeducational colleges at the time. She applied only two years after the University opened its doors to women.

Freeman did poorly on her entrance exams, but impressed then-President James Burrill Angell with her high intelligence. He requested that examiners permit Freeman to enter U-M on a six-week trial; her record at the University and subsequent endeavors proved the president correct.

Afterward she went to Wellesley, where she taught Greek and Latin and then became assistant principal of a high school in Saginaw. She spent the summer of 1877 in Ann Arbor studying for a higher degree, but never completed the thesis for her work. Still, the University awarded her a doctoral degree in 1882, the first year of her presidency at Wellesley at age 27.

Andrews also found her way to Wellesley after teaching algebra at Ann Arbor High School and math and Latin at the Detroit Female Seminary. Eventually she became principal at Harcourt Place Seminary in Ohio before moving on to the Wisconsin Normal School in Oshkosh, where she taught geography. Besides her career in education, she became an importer of lace and other needlework from Armenia.

Marston also became a teacher at Wellesley, married, became the mother of five children and became a member of the Official Board of Visitors at the University of Wisconsin. At age 68 she began a trip around the world, returning to Wisconsin at 72.

These three U-M graduates knew early the importance of education for themselves and for all women and put themselves and their peers in the forefront of a movement that continues working 125 years later for educational equity for women.

For more information go to www.aauw.org.

U-M graduates were key to AAUW's start

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