Jessica Garretson Finch was an American educator, author, women"s rights activist, founder of the Lennox School for girls, and founding president of.
Background
Finch was born on 19 August 1871, the daughter of Congregational minister Review Ferdinand Van De Vere Garretson and Helen Philbrick Garretson. When she was 12, the family moved from New York, where her father was rector of Grace Chapel on West 22nd Street, to Franconia, New Hampshire.
Education
She attended Dow Academy and the Cambridge Latin School before entering Barnard College.
Career
Finch received her Bachelor of Arts from Barnard College in 1893, the first graduating class of the new, women"s college. She applied to attend law school at Columbia University, and was formally refused on the grounds that the Law School did not admit women. She earned her Bachelor of Laws from New York University School of Law in 1898.
She was a well-known suffragette, president of the New York Equal Franchise Society.
Finch was an advocate of careers for women. She gave paid, public talks on the subject to young ladies as a part-time job to help support herself when she was a college student in the 1890s.
She continued to lecture to young ladies on a range of topics, and also worked as a tutor in subjects including Greek after graduating form college. In a February 1908 talk that Finch gave at the Civitas Club in New York City, she said:
In June 1949 she was given a Doctorate of Humane Letters, honoris causa, by New York University.
The citation described her as a graduate of the university"s law school who had founded a women"s college, "on the unorthodox postulate that every graduate should mother at least four children and cultivate a non-domestic avocation fore and aft."
Finch founded the Finch school to provide career training for young women, saying that her own education at Barnard College had not given her or her classmates the skills needed to earn a living.
Ironically, Finch became not a career-oriented college, but rather "one of the most famed of United States. girls" finishing schools."
Finch founded the Finch School, later Finch Junior College, and, after 1952,, to enact her conviction that women ought to be prepared for careers. Finch founded the college as the Finch School, a secondary school for girls. In 1916 she founded the Lennox School, a primary school to prepare girls to enter the Finch School.
In 1913 Finch married John O"Hara Cosgrave, an editor of the New York World, who died in 1947.
She was the mother of Elsie Finch McKeogh, a New York literary agent. Finch died at her home in Manhattan on 31 October 1949.
Politics
Although in 1912 she self-described as an "orthodox Socialist", her views shifted and she was later described as a political "liberal".