Elizabeth Powell Bond was an American educator, writer and social activist. She served as the 1st Dean of Women at Swarthmore College from 1890 to 1906.
Background
Elizabeth Bond was born on January 25, 1841, in Dutchess County, New York, United States, one of the four children of Townsend and Catherine (Macy) Powell. She was a descendant of John Howland, the Mayflower Pilgrim, and of other New England ancestors. Brought up in a Quaker environment, she passed a quiet childhood, the chief incidents of which were the frequent visits of antislavery advocates to her parents' home.
Education
When Elizabeth was four years of age the family moved to Ghent, New York, where she attended a small country school until she was sixteen years old, after which she had one year at the State Normal School in Albany. In Boston she also attended Dr. Dio Lewis's school for physical culture.
Career
In 1886, her abiding interest in higher education led Bond to accept a call to Swarthmore College, where she became dean in 1890. Her special task was to preside over the students' social life, and she succeeded to an extraordinary degree in placing the college life in a home setting. Coeducation was still on trial in the East, and Dean Bond raised it from the stage of doubt and experiment to an assured success. She was also a frequent contributor in both prose and verse to current periodicals. In 1906, she retired from active service with the title of "Dean Emeritus, " and resided for the remainder of her life in Germantown, Philadelphia.
Bond continued her interest in education, and aided as she could such movements as the advancement of women, international peace, and especially the promotion of the negro race, whose problems had stirred her heart in youth and had not been wholly solved, she believed, by freedom from slavery. She lectured frequently, to school, club, and college audiences, on all of these topics. One of her favorite and most popular lectures was upon the reminiscences of her personal friendship with Emerson and Garrison, their families, and the literary and antislavery circles of which they were the center.
Achievements
Membership
Bond was a life-long member of the Society of Friends (Liberal Branch).
Personality
Her simplicity and graciousness of demeanor, her dignity of bearing, her characteristic manner of dress, her gentleness of spirit, her delicacy of feeling, her culture and appreciation of the beautiful, her gifts of mind and heart, and her implicit obedience to the demands of an unusually sensitive Puritan-Quaker conscience, combined to create in her a personality whose impress left a permanent influence upon the ideals of her time.
Connections
On May 23, 1872, Elizabeth married Henry Herrick Bond, a lawyer of Northampton, Massachussets. Her husband died in 1881, leaving her with one child, Edwin Powell Bond.