Background
She was born in Harpoot, Turkey, the eldest of three daughters and three sons of missionary parents, John Kittredge Browne and Leila (Kendall) Browne. Both parents were natives of Massachusetts.
She was born in Harpoot, Turkey, the eldest of three daughters and three sons of missionary parents, John Kittredge Browne and Leila (Kendall) Browne. Both parents were natives of Massachusetts.
Browne was a graduate of Harvard and of Andover Theological Seminary.
She was then sent home to Massachusetts to study at the Cambridge Latin School before entering Mount Holyoke College, from which she graduated in 1900 with Phi Beta Kappa honors.
In college she was active in the work of the Y. W. C. A. and popular with her classmates for her lively intelligence and charm.
Mount Holyoke was notable not only because it was a pioneer in the higher education of women, a veritable breeding ground of feminism, but also because it urged its graduates to take up missionary work as a career.
Alice's mother had, in fact, received the call to missionary work while a student at Mount Holyoke and had left without graduating.
To prepare herself as a religious educator, she first attended Hartford Theological Seminary for three years and earned a B. D. degree (1903).
Mount Holyoke was notable not only because it was a pioneer in the higher education of women, a veritable breeding ground of feminism, but also because it urged its graduates to take up missionary work as a career.
Increasing numbers of unmarried American women missionaries, including Mount Holyoke graduates, had been sent abroad as teachers and doctors since the formation of women's mission boards shortly after the Civil War.
Alice's mother had, in fact, received the call to missionary work while a student at Mount Holyoke and had left without graduating.
The example of her parents and her college thus influenced Alice Browne to become a missionary educator, and the drama of the Boxer Rebellion, with its stories of missionary martyrdom and heroism, decided her to seek service in China. Though slight and delicate in appearance, she had great reserves of physical strength and will.
She then worked for two years in the United States for the Woman's Board of Missions (Congregational) as secretary of young people's work.
The variety of work and her professional independence made this a happy period in her career. Her administrative and intellectual reputation, however, soon propelled her out of Tungchow. A leading missionary goal had been higher education for Chinese women.
Shortly before Alice Browne's arrival in China, Luella Miner had organized the first women's college in the country, North China Union College for Women, in Peking. In search of competent teachers and administrators, Miner invited Alice Browne to teach at the college for a year, not only as a prospective faculty member but as her possible successor as head of the college.
Miss Browne's engagement to Murray Scott Frame, a missionary she had met in Tungchow, disrupted this plan.
In 1918 Frame died of typhus. Left with her infant daughter, Frame set about to rebuild her life. By now her roots were in China, and soon after her husband's death she temporarily assumed leadership of the North China College for Women; after a brief furlough in the United States she became its official head in 1922.
The college had affiliated in 1920 with the allmale Yenching University, an interdenominational institution in Peking headed by John Leighton Stuart. Frame's first major task was to oversee the construction of the women's college buildings at Yenching. Donations from Mrs. Russell Sage [Margaret Olivia Slocum Sage, and Mrs. David B. Gamble, among others, provided for the erection of a full complement of administrative, classroom, and residential quarters, which were formally opened in September 1927.
During these years Frame's feminist convictions were thoroughly tested. Although her school became the largest Christian women's college in China, with an enrollment of more than two hundred women by 1930, girls were outnumbered by male students in the university two and a half to one. Alice Frame was determined that the identity, the financial resources, and the autonomy of the women's institution should not be swallowed up.
It is not certain that she was the primary force behind the plan, later dropped, for a geographically separate women's college with a moat around it. But it is well remembered that she fought to get female faculty members promotions, that she kept control of the women's college funds, and that she was proof against both the charm and the occasional high-handedness of President Stuart.
She was officially, and clearly, dean of Yenching Women's College, not the university's dean of women. According to Margaret Speer, her successor, Frame was a "masterful woman. " Her masterfulness invited criticism, especially from male students and faculty, but she succeeded in preserving much of the independence of her institution.
A recent historian of Yenching, Prof. Philip West, credits her with setting a high standard for women students, thus helping to create the college's distinguished reputation in North China higher education.
The 1920's presented problems for Yenching, in common with other Christian colleges in China. The growth of nationalism, anti-Christian movements, the rise of new life styles for the young, and changing views about the curriculum all sent shock waves across the campus. Pressure grew to appoint Chinese as top administrators.
A Chinese scholar, Wu Lei-ch'uan, was made chancellor of Yenching and began to press for a unified administration of the male and female colleges. Vulnerable not only as a foreigner but also as an administrator, Alice Frame came under attack and even personal threat, particularly by male students who found her a convenient target for their feelings of frustration and dissidence.
In 1930 she asked to resign as soon as a Chinese woman could be found to replace her, and the next year she returned to Tungchow and to her work in the countryside, serving as secretary of religious education for the Congregational Church in North China. Mrs. Frame developed tuberculosis in 1932 and the following year went back to the United States, where, even while convalescing, she was still able to report that mountain climbing was a hobby and walking her favorite sport. In 1934 she again took up her work in China until, ill with cancer, she returned once more to the United States in 1940. She died in Newton, Massachussets, at the age of sixty-two. Her daughter Rosamond, like her mother a Mount Holyoke graduate and teacher in China, served as a field agent in China for the Office of Strategic Services in World War II.
In 1905 she sailed for China, financed by contributions from Mount Holyoke students and alumnae, who were to provide her lifetime support. Her deep commitment to the career she had chosen soon became evident. Alice Browne's first stop was Tungchow, a town near Peking that had become a missionary educational center. Within a year she had learned Mandarin well enough to do evangelistic work in country districts, and had also become principal of the Fu Yu Girls' School. Her fluency in the language was later considered remarkable.
After a furlough which she largely spent studying at Columbia University and Union Theological Seminary, they were married in Kyoto, Japan, on October 10, 1913. The couple had three children: Frances Kendall (who died in infancy), Murray Scott (who died at birth), and Rosamond.
