Elsie Whetnall

Background

Elsie Whetnall was the daughter of Thomas William Ward Whetnall a Staff Officer for the Board of Education and Emma Cox.

Education

She was educated at Southall County Secondary School, then at Bedford College, where she obtained a first class degree in 1921.

Career

Whetnall was an external doctoral student of Susan Stebbing, at Bedford College where she wrote her thesis on the theory of symbols. Whetnall was a non-resident Director of Studies and Lecturer in Moral Sciences (philosophy) for Girton College and Newnham College. She attended Girton College, Cambridge as a Jex-Blake student between 1924 and 1926.

While at Cambridge, she was one of the first woman officers in the Moral Sciences Club, in her role as Club Secretary for a paper Bertrand Russell delivered on 3 December 1926.

She returned to Bedford College as Stebbing"s temporary replacement during 1930 and 1931 She also taught at the Hillcroft College for Working Women, Surbiton, a women"s residential college from 1932 to 1943. In 1925 she became one of very few women to be elected to the membership of the Aristotelian Society and was an active member and frequent panel discussant in the company of other notable panellists including General Electric Moore, John Wisdom, Communicative Disorders Broad, and Stace.

In the early 1930s she considered metaphysical analysis to be useful for considering the psychological process of concept formation. She contributed to works on logic such as the revised edition of James Welton"s An Intermediate Logic.

Whetnall married William James Smith on 30 August 1939.

Connections

Friend:

East.M. Whetnall