Aurelia Isabel Henry Reinhardt was an educator, activist, and prominent member and leader of numerous organizations.
Background
Aurelia Henry Reinhardt was born on April 1, 1877 in San Francisco, California, the second daughter and second of six children of William Warner Henry and Mollie (Merritt) Henry. Her father traveled to California in 1858 from Bennington, Vermont; her mother's family, originally from Pennsylvania, went west from Muscatine, Iowa, in 1863. Her father ran a wholesale grocery business in San Francisco, and her mother increased the family's income by running a boardinghouse and then a small hotel.
Education
Aurelia attended San Francisco Boys' High School, newly co-educational, from 1888 to 1890, when the family temporarily moved to San Jacinto. In 1894 Aurelia entered the University of California at Berkeley, receiving the B. Litt. degree in 1898. She led an active social life and was not a brilliant student.
She decided to undertake graduate study in English at Yale, studying under Albert S. Cook and receiving the Ph. D. in 1905.
Career
From 1898 to 1901 she was instructor in physical culture and elocution at the University of Idaho, where she impressed students with her unusual energy, sympathy, charm, and cultivation. She taught a wide range of subjects, played in a student orchestra, and briefly considered acting as an alternative career.
Though her work was merely competent, she enjoyed steady encouragement, publishing a translation of Dante's De Monarchia (1904) and her dissertation on Ben Jonson's Epicoene. From 1903 to 1908, interrupted by one year of travel and study in Europe, she held the chair of English at the State Normal School, Lewiston, Idaho. Lonely despite her busy, outgoing involvement in college social life, she returned to Berkeley, where her family had long since settled.
She spent 1908-1909 dedicatedly nursing her brother Paul during his terminal illness and writing short stories, which she was never able to publish. On December 4, 1909, she married Dr. George Frederick Reinhardt, a longtime family acquaintance and founder and director of the University Health Service in Berkeley. Two sons, George Frederick (eventually ambassador to Italy) and Paul Henry, were born in 1911 and 1913.
In 1914 her husband died of blood poisoning contracted from a patient. There is much evidence that her marriage had been a strain for her. To a great extent, the couple had led separate social lives. The young widow was offered a position teaching English in the University of California extension division. She lectured throughout the state and made a spectacular impression upon her audiences with her vivid, energetic personality. Then Mills College in Oakland invited her to become its president. Although she had two very young boys to raise, she eagerly accepted. Her impact upon Mills, from her arrival in August 1916 until her retirement in September 1943, was enormous. When she entered upon her duties, the institution was old-fashioned, rudderless, and faltering.
By 1927, she had increased student enrollment from 212 to 624; by 1943, faculty had risen from 39 to 101. Quickly she gathered authority into her own hands. An admirer of Oxford traditionalism, she indulged in no radical curricular experiments, but gradually began raising academic standards. Aside from emphasizing the ability of women to enter a wide variety of occupations, she upheld time-honored academic ideals of leadership and service. Strengthening the college was her central aim, rather than using the institution to demonstrate a striking education philosophy. She retained complete control of faculty appointments and moved Mills firmly into the orbit of national academic respectability, but a great many appointments were made either to personal friends or as a result of impulsive gestures.
An alternative strategy was to seek out Rhodes scholars, among them Dean Rusk, later U. S. secretary of state. Her professors were not expected to publish, but to be at her constant beck and call for local social events.
She went out of her way to offer positions to European refugees in the 1930's, among them the composer Darius Milhaud. Beginning in 1921, Mills offered the M. A. degree to both men and women.
In 1926 she arbitrarily restructured the previously departmentalized faculty into five divisional "schools. " In sum, the tone of her administration was intensely personal and familial. Undeniably, she was autocratic; she could be sufficiently emotional to throw a book across a room. She would unpredictably order professors to teach particular courses on short notice, and in 1934 the trustees had to intervene to prevent her from carrying out capricious dismissals.
She shrewdly managed scarce financial resources, but encouraged the development of extreme inequities among faculty salaries. All but a minority of the faculty revered her despite these failings. She had no airs, casually helping wash dishes after a dinner. But the faculty had to cope with her tireless, demanding intervention in every small daily matter. Indeed, she could be called "almost overpowering. "
Reading widely if not deeply, she impulsively embraced a great variety of causes from right to left, though her activity in behalf of woman's suffrage, which began as early as 1904, was notably consistent. She held many local civic positions. In 1919 she was president of the Oakland City Planning Commission. She was national president of the American Association of University Women from 1923 to 1927, and in 1928-1930 chairman of the department of education of the General Federation of Women's Clubs.
After retirement she traveled widely, suffering increasing heart trouble. She died at the home of her son Paul, a Palo Alto physician. Her ashes are at the Oakland Columbarium.
Achievements
Reinhardt was named "one of the ten outstanding women of 1940" by the publication American Women. She was also selected as the California State Mother in 1946.
During the 1930's she was active in nationwide Unitarian church affairs.
Politics
A Republican, she remained loyal to Herbert Hoover even in 1936 but also publicly opposed Japanese relocation in 1942.
Personality
Students regarded her with a mixture of fear and admiration; she prided herself on knowing them all as individuals. Public relations was one of her greatest strengths.
On her frequent statewide tours she always made a powerful impact on her audiences. Over the years she grew increasingly garrulous, pouring forth opinions on all subjects to anyone who would listen, desperately wanting to be liked.
Connections
She was married to George F. Reinhardt in 1909, with whom she had two sons she raised after his unexpected death in 1914.
