Alice Mabel Bacon was an American writer, women's educator and a foreign advisor to the Japanese government in Meiji period Japan.
Background
Alice Mabel Bacon was born on February 6, 1858. She was the youngest of three daughters and two sons of Leonard Bacon, pastor of the Center Church in New Haven, Connecticut, and professor in the Yale Divinity School, and his second wife, Catherine Elizabeth Terry Bacon.
Education
She was educated at private schools in New Haven. She passed the Harvard examinations for women in 1881.
Career
Her observations and experiences in this environment, and later in another school, were the subject of books and lectures in which she attempted to interpret Japanese civilization to Americans. In letters to her brothers and sisters, collected in Japanese Girls and Women (1891) and in A Japanese Interior (1893), she describes the domestic life and the customs, the popular beliefs and superstitions, of all classes, whom she was particularly well able to observe. She was a familiar guest in many Japanese households, and her contact with ladies almost untouched by foreign influence was very close. Returning to America in 1889, she taught again at Hampton until 1899, and and founded the Dixie Hospital for the training of colored nurses in 1890.
In 1896, in connection with the Atlanta Exposition, she published a survey and evaluation of the development of the colored race. But Japan called her once more in 1899 and she crossed the Pacific to teach for two years at the Higher Normal School in Tokyo. Again in America, she was a teacher for one year in Miss Capen's school in Northampton, Massachussets Until shortly before her death she spent her summers in managing Deep Haven camp in Holderness, New Hampshire, where for successive years large numbers of her friends gathered. Her published works are Japanese Girls and Women (1891, republished in 1902, in a revised and enlarged edition, with illustrations by Keishu Takanouchi); A Japanese Interior (1893); The Negro and the Atlanta Exposition (Occasional Papers, No. 7, published by Trustees of the John F. Slater Fund, Baltimore, 1896); In the Land of the Gods (1905). She edited Human Bullets, A Soldier's Story of Port Arthur, by Tadayoski Sakurai (1907).
Connections
Alice remained single all of her life, although she did adopt two Japanese girls as her daughters.