Alice Elvira Freeman Palmer

Alice Elvira Freeman Palmer (born Feb. 21, 1855, Colesville [near Binghamton], N.Y., U.S.—died Dec. 6, 1902, Paris, France) was an American educator who exerted a strong and lasting influence on the academic and administrative character of Wellesley (Massachusetts) College during her brief tenure as its president.

Alice Freeman had taught herself to read by the time she entered local district school at the age of four. In 1872 she sat for the entrance examination at the University of Michigan, then the foremost university to which women were admitted, and although she proved deficient in some areas, the deep impression she made on the university’s president, James B. Angell, induced him to admit her. She quickly made up her deficiencies and graduated in 1876. Over the next three years she taught school in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, and then served as head of the high school in Saginaw, Michigan, while pursuing graduate studies at the university in the summers. The need to support her family forced her to decline Henry F. Durant’s offers of instructorships in mathematics and then in Greek at Wellesley College in 1877 and 1878, but in 1879 she was at last free to accept the post of head of the history department.

On the death of Durant in October 1881 and the resignation of President Ada L. Howard in the next month, Freeman was named vice president and acting president of Wellesley. In 1882 she became president. In the same year, she was awarded an honorary Ph.D. by the University of Michigan. In her five years as president of Wellesley she created much of the framework of faculty and student organization that would be carried on long after. She was particularly successful in raising academic standards and in establishing a system of 15 preparatory schools around the country to supply students to the college. She was a founder in 1881 of the Association of Collegiate Alumnae (later the American Association of University Women) and president of the group from 1885 to 1886. She resigned from Wellesley in 1887, to much private and public dismay, in order to marry in December of that year George Herbert Palmer, professor of philosophy at Harvard. (She was succeeded as president by Helen A. Shafer.)

Her connection with Wellesley continued in the form of membership on the board of trustees from 1888. In 1889 the governor appointed her to the Massachusetts State Board of Education, through which she worked to great effect to improve the state’s normal schools. In 1892 she was named first dean of women at the new University of Chicago, a post she held until 1895. During that period she was also active in organizing the women’s educational work at Harvard Annex (soon to become Radcliffe College) and its relationship to Harvard proper.