Description
Book SynopsisMary Rippon was a pioneer woman educator in the male-dominated world of nineteenth-century academia. As the first female professor at the University of Colorado, she is believed to have been the first woman in the U.S. to teach at a state university. Mary received wide acclaim for her teaching, but Victorian society forced her to lead two very separate lives. Miss Rippon, as she was always called, was both a professional woman and a mother in an era when these two roles could not be combined. In order to keep her job, she hid her husband and child behind a Victorian veil of secrecy that spanned two continents. Now, for the first time, the full story of the conflicts between this extraordinary woman's public and private lives is revealed.
Readers will follow Mary from her small midwestern hometown to the great centers of culture in Europe. In January 1878, after several years of education in Germany, France, and Switzerland, the soft-spoken twenty-seven-year-old was welcomed at
