educator public official author
Bessie Locke was born on August 7, 1865 in West Cambridge (later Arlington), Massachusetts, United States, the daughter of William Henry and Jane MacFarland Schoulder Locke. As a result of the panic of 1869, her father lost his business, the Passaic (New Jersey) Print Works; he then opened a fabric-printing factory (printing satinets) in Brooklyn, New York.
Bessie Locke attended a private kindergarten, at that time a recent importation from Germany, and the Brooklyn public schools. She also took business courses at Columbia University but never earned a degree.
While still in her teens, Bessie worked as a bookkeeper. For two years she was assistant to the pastor at All Souls Church in Brooklyn, and for two and a half years managed a millinery store owned by an uncle in North Carolina. Returning to New York City, Locke visited (in 1892, by one account) a mission kindergarten in a slum area, which enrolled children of many nationalities. The kindergarten was run by a friend who had studied with a disciple of the founder of the German kindergarten, Friedrich Froebel. Locke's first reaction was that her friend had undertaken a hopeless task in attempting to aid the slum children. But when she returned six months later for a second visit, she was deeply impressed by the changed appearance and behavior of the children. She was thus turned toward her life's work.
Believing that many neglected children grew up to be misguided adults, Locke became convinced that, next to the church, the kindergarten could best serve to improve humanity. She began to collect money to establish another kindergarten and organized a group of influential citizens to form the East End Kindergarten Union of Brooklyn. Locke was financial secretary and later trustee of the Brooklyn Free Kindergarten Society from 1896 to 1923 and financial secretary of the New York Kindergarten Society from 1899. She raised $700, 000 for mission kindergartens and as endowments for five other kindergartens in New York City. The $250, 000 she secured from John D. Archbold of the Standard Oil Company of New Jersey was used to house the New York Kindergarten Society, which also served as a community center for mothers and their small children.
Recognizing a countrywide need for more kindergartens, she began in 1906 to seek trustees and backing for a national kindergarten association. Her efforts resulted in the founding in 1909 of the National Association for the Promotion of Kindergarten Education, renamed the National Kindergarten Association in 1911. She participated in the association as an organizer, director, and executive director until almost the end of her life. In 1912 the United States Commissioner of Education Philander P. Claxton asked the National Kindergarten Association to help him form a kindergarten division of the United States Bureau of Education. Locke became the chief of that division from 1913 to 1919
With the aid of the commissioner, she started in 1917 the publication of home education articles for parents. In 1919 the National Kindergarten Association took responsibility for these articles, and in 1923 Locke's close associate Florence Jane Ovens assumed the editorship of the publications.
Locke was chairman of the kindergarten extension division of the National Congress of Parents and Teachers from 1913 to 1922. She was a director of the National Council of Women from 1921 to 1946 and honorary vice-president after 1946. She served as a member of the governing board of the National College of Education from 1920. She died in New York City.
During her lifetime Locke helped to open more than 3, 260 kindergartens (most of them in public schools) with an enrollment of more than 1. 6 million children. She was the founder of the National Kindergarten Association and was instrumental in improving kindergarten teacher-training courses. At the time of Locke's death her home education articles had reached more than 38 million persons through state home-demonstration agents in study groups in the United States and through international distribution in forty-three other countries.
She was a life member of the International Council of Women and of the Association for Childhood Education.
