She was born on September 23, 1839 in Newark, New Jersey, United States, the daughter of Archibald and Almira (Miller) Shafer. In her girlhood, her father, a Congregational minister of Scotch and German ancestry, moved with his family to Ohio.
Helen entered Oberlin College, where she was graduated in 1863.
After two years of teaching in New Jersey, she went to St. Louis, Missouri, as teacher of mathematics under William Torrey Harris, then superintendent of the St. Louis public schools and later United States commissioner of education.
In 1877, her ability and distinction as a teacher of mathematics fully established, she was offered the chair of mathematics at Wellesley, two years after the founding of the college. The department of mathematics was hers to create, and under her leadership it became one of the strongest in the college. When as yet no adequate textbooks existed in English, she gave courses in the history of geometry and in determinants.
In 1888 she succeeded to the presidency of the college. The administration of her predecessor, Alice Elvira Freeman Palmer, had been brilliant, and in its nature extensive. Helen Shafer's work as scholar and administrator was intensive. There have since been further modifications of the elective system, her work, wise, far-seeing, and modern, was the basis of Wellesley's later academic instruction. The social life of the undergraduate gained in dignity and freedom during her term of office.
In the last ten years of her life she was constantly fighting a tendency to tuberculosis. In 1890-91 she spent a winter in Thomasville, Georgia, for her health. Undoubtedly her life might have been prolonged had she chosen to retire, but she gave the college two more years and died at Wellesley of heart failure following upon pneumonia.
Helen Almira Shafer was well-known as the president of Wellesley College, where she created the strongest department of mathematics and gave courses in the history of geometry and in determinants, one of the first colleges to offer such work. Under her stimulus and guidance the curriculum was completely remodeled, the requirements for admission were altered to meet the exigencies of the new plan, and sixty-seven new courses of study were opened to the students. She also fostered the beginnings of the college periodicals and furthered the reestablishment of the local Greek-letter societies
A masculine strain; justice, integrity, intellectual vision, and practical insight were her outstanding qualities.
Tall and slender, with a grave and rather severe exterior, she had the kindliness of a Christian gentlewoman and an unexpected sense of humor. A Scotch keenness of mind and a German thoroughness characterize all her work.
