Background
Elizabeth Avery Colton was the daughter of James Hooper Colton, a Confederate soldier of Massachusetts ancestry and of Eloise Avery, a descendant of a North Carolina family of some distinction. Her father was a missionary to the Choctaws in the Indian Territory, later to become the state of Oklahoma, United States where Elizabeth was born on December 30, 1872. She was the eldest of eight children. In her later life are to be seen the influence of the minister’s home, with its cramped means and large demands, and its traditions of conscientiousness, altruism, and love of learning.
Education
Colton prepared for college in the public schools of Jonesboro, North Carolina, and in a private “college” at Statesville. A year or two of teaching, to support herself and get means to go to college, preceded her entrance to Mount Holyoke in 1891. She spent two years from 1891 to 1893 there until the death of her father. She received the Bachelor of Science degree at Teachers College in 1903, and the Master of Arts degree at Columbia in 1905.
Career
About 1893 Colton became a head of the department of English in Queen’s College at Charlotte, North Carolina. The six years spent here seem to have determined her later career. The low standards of the school contrasted painfully with what she had seen in the East. About 1905 she became a teacher in the Horace Mann School and then spent next three years as an instructor at Wellesley College.
Meanwhile she was evidently cherishing her ambitions to aid in he educational regeneration of the South. In 1903 she had become a charter member of the Southern Association of College Women; and in 1908 an invitation to Meredith College (Raleigh, North Carolina) as head of the department of English furnished her opportunity. She was personally well fitted for the leadership of college women. In 1910 she became chairman of the committee on college standards of the Southern Association of College Women, and for the next eight years was a recognized leader in the campaign. She became secretary in 1912, and president in 1914.
In a series of incisive pamphlets she exposed the pretensions of the many so-called colleges for women in the South, insisting upon standards of equipment, faculty scholarship and recording, and fully recognizing such merit as she found. Her chief papers were on “The Approximate Value of Recent Degrees of Southern Colleges”, and one which largely superseded it, “The Various Types of Southern Colleges for Women”. These evoked a storm of criticism and “more than one presidential threat of a libel suit”. The opposition alleged that her findings were based on inadequate data, were contradicted by the results of official inspection, were unfairly discriminatory, and were prompted by personal motives. Even in her own school a faction thought her a fanatic and a pedant. Time has, however, largely justified her. In 1919 her health broke down and she resigned her public leadership. Two years later she gave up teaching and spent the rest of her life in a vain search for health. Before her death she had the satisfaction of knowing that her campaign was on the road to success.
Membership
Colton was a member of Southern Association of College Women.
Personality
Colton was of slight build and attractive appearance, well-groomed and modish in dress, vivacious and witty, and buoyant and carefree in temperament even in her years of heavy responsibility and physical pain. To generosity and disregard of her personal welfare, which won intense personal devotion, she added unbending devotion to principle as she saw it, and a keen relish for a fight in a righteous cause.
