Isabel Bevier was an American educator. She helped to develop the “household science” program at the University of Illinois.
Background
Isabel Bevier was born on November 14, 1860, on a farm near Plymouth, Ohio, United States, the fifth daughter and youngest child of Caleb and Cornelia (Brinkerhoff) Bevier, seven of whose nine children survived childhood. Her paternal ancestor, a Huguenot patentee of New Paltz, New York, had come from the Rhenish Palatinate in 1675; her Brinkerhoff forebears had emigrated from Holland to New Amsterdam in 1638; and the two families had several times intermarried. Her maternal grandfather, Henry Roelifsen Brinkerhoff (1787 - 1844), served in the New York state legislature and as senior general of the state militia before moving to Ohio in 1838; Roeliff Brinkerhoff was a first cousin of Isabel's mother.
Education
Isabel attended the Plymouth high school for two years and Wooster (Ohio) Preparatory School. She then entered the College of Wooster, where she excelled in languages and literature and became the first state chairman of the Young Women's Christian Association. She graduated in 1885 with the Ph. B. degree. In 1888 Isabel received a Ph. M. degree at Wooster. Later she studied chemistry at the Case School of Applied Science in Cleveland, Ohio, food chemistry at Harvard (1891) and nutritional studies in Pittsburgh and in Hampton, Virginia (1898). She also briefly studied organic chemistry at Western Reserve University.
Career
Isabel spent two years as principal of the Shelby high school, taught mathematics and Latin for a year at the Mount Vernon (Ohio) high school. That same year she suffered a severe blow with the death of her fiancé, an event which affected her intellectual interests permanently. To be near her former college roommate, then living in Pittsburgh, she accepted a position teaching science at Pennsylvania College for Women in that city. The first woman to be admitted, she worked there in the summers of 1888 and 1889 under the chemist Albert W. Smith, the first of several mentors who shaped her career. During her nine years at the Pennsylvania college she taught geology, physics, and botany, in addition to chemistry. Later she worked as a chemist at the World's Columbian Exposition (1893) and in the laboratory of the agricultural chemist Wilbur O. Atwater at Wesleyan University. Miss Bevier disliked life in a women's college and resigned in 1897.
Later Bevier went to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to work in food chemistry under Ellen H. Richards. In 1898 she reluctantly accepted a post as professor of chemistry at another women's institution, Lake Erie College at Painesville, Ohio, but resigned after two years to become professor of household science at the University of Illinois. Miss Bevier had been personally selected by President Andrew S. Draper to revive the university's home economics department. To build the kind of department he envisaged, he urged her to incorporate anything in the university curriculum she thought appropriate. Working closely with him and with Dean Eugene Davenport of the College of Agriculture, she eventually built a department that was highly respected locally and gained national prominence.
Her goal was not to teach the mechanics of cooking and sewing, but to offer young women training in the chemical principles involved in nutrition and sanitation, to inculcate standards of taste in household furnishing and decorating, and to implant a sense of civic responsibility, all as part of a liberal education. She insisted on entrance requirements that met those of other departments in the university and made chemistry a prerequisite.
Her determination not to accept students who lacked the usual college entrance qualifications and her adoption of a scientific rather than a narrowly utilitarian approach to household economy evoked criticism from the women of the Illinois Farmers' Institute, and her rejection of a proposed advisory committee of Farmers' Institute women brought her into sharp conflict with that body. Fearful of alienating so influential a group, Dean Davenport advised Bevier to resign, but she stood her ground and on her return from a year's leave of absence (1910 - 1911) found herself vindicated. Following the establishment of extension courses in agriculture and home economics under the Smith-Lever Act, she was put in charge of the Illinois women's section (1914). Miss Bevier served as a vice-chairman of the Lake Placid Conference on Home Economics, forerunner of the American Home Economics Association, and a member of the editorial board of its Journal of Home Economics (1909 - 1912). She was the first chairman of the home economics section of the Association of Land Grant Colleges and Universities (1917 - 1919).
During World War I she was chairman of the Illinois committee for the conservation of food under the Council of National Defense and spent two months in the national office of the Food Administrator, where she helped prepare five bulletins on food. In 1918 she became a member of the first subcommittee on food and nutrition under the National Research Council. She also lectured widely.
Though a woman of great vitality and serenity, Isabel Bevier felt too tired at the age of sixty to face an impending departmental building program and resigned in 1921. She spent the next two years as chairman of the home economics department at the University of California at Los Angeles and, in 1925, a semester at the University of Arizona before returning to the University of Illinois in 1928 to join the staff of the extension service. After her second retirement, in 1930, she made her fourth trip to Europe, travel being one of her chief pleasures. In her last years she continued to live in Urbana, Illinois, and she died at her home there of chronic myocarditis at the age of eighty-one. She was buried in Greenlawn Cemetery, Plymouth, Ohio.
Religion
Isabel Bevier was a member of the Presbyterian Church.
Membership
Isabel Bevier was vice-president in 1908 and president from 1910 to 1912 of the American Home Economics Association; a member of the League of Women Voters.
Personality
Tall and sturdily built, Bevier was a vigorous leader. Though her talk was lightened by humor, she was forthright to the point of bluntness, sometimes showing impatience with what she considered superficialities.
