Putnam, Emily James Smith

▪ American educator and historian

née  Emily James Smith  

born April 15, 1865, Canandaigua, N.Y., U.S.

died Sept. 7, 1944, Kingston, Jamaica

      American educator and historian, remembered especially for her early influence on the academic quality of Barnard College in New York City.

      Emily Smith graduated from Bryn Mawr (Pennsylvania) College with the first class, that of 1889, and then attended Girton College, Cambridge, for two years. She taught at the Packer Collegiate Institute in Brooklyn, New York (1891–93), and was a fellow in Greek at the University of Chicago (1893–94).

      In 1894 she was appointed first dean of the five-year-old Barnard College, which had been established in 1889 as the “women's annex” of Columbia University. Over the next six years she succeeded in greatly strengthening Barnard's academic standing by establishing a more equitable relationship with Columbia. Columbia professors were made more accessible; other scholars of similar qualifications were added to the Barnard faculty; and Columbia's graduate courses, libraries, and other facilities were opened to Barnard women. During that period Smith also taught courses in Greek literature and philosophy. In 1899 she married publisher George H. Putnam, and the next year she resigned as dean.

      From 1901 to 1904 Emily Putnam served as president of the League for Political Education, and from 1901 to 1905 she was a trustee of Barnard. In 1910 she published The Lady: Studies of Certain Significant Phases of Her History, a major historical study of women in society. She resumed teaching at Barnard in 1914 in the history department and from 1920 taught in the department of Greek. In 1926 she published Candaules' Wife and Other Old Stories, a study of Herodotus. She also published translations of Selections from Lucian (1892), Émile Fauget's Dread of Responsibility (1914), Marcel Berger's The Secret of the Marne (1918), and Raymond Escholier's The Illusion (1921). Putnam helped establish the New School for Social Research (1919) and was a regular lecturer there (1920–32). She retired from Barnard in 1930. She lived in Spain until 1936 and thereafter in Jamaica.

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