Mortimer, Mary, , England 1816 1877 Female College President Teacher General teacher and first principal of Milwaukee College and pioneer in the higher education of women in the decades before and after the Civil War, In collaboration with Catharine Esther Beecher [q. v. ], she inaugurated in Milwaukee, Wis. , in 1851, a college system of instruction for young women.
At the age of twenty-one (1838), she rounded out her education by two years' study at Geneva Seminary, New York, after which she taught there and in other seminaries near-by; in 1849, she started a school of her own in Ottawa, Ill. , only to have it fail on account of an outbreak of cholera.
At this juncture she met Catharine Beecher and, as a result, entered upon the task of carrying into practice Miss Beecher's theories for the reform of feminine education, particularly the formation in the West of endowed, nonsectarian schools for young women, organized on the college plan.
Career
It was a singularly congenial partnership.
In 1852 Catharine Beecher and Mary Mortimer spent June and July at Harriet Beecher Stowe's home in Brunswick, Me. , working out a course of study; they also formed the American Woman's Educational Association largely to secure an endowment for the infant college and for similar institutions which it was hoped would spread over the nation in imitation of Milwaukee's example.
In the interval between she was for a time principal of a seminary in Baraboo, Wis.
The last three years of her life she spent at her home, "Willow Glen, " Milwaukee, giving lectures, building up a post-graduate course, initiating and organizing the Woman's Club of Wisconsin.
In 1895 Milwaukee Female College merged with Downer College of Fox Lake, and the new institution took the name of Milwaukee-Downer College.
Connections
When she was five years old her family moved to America, and, after a brief stay of two years in New York City, settled on a farm in western New York in the town of Phelps, and here the transplanted English child grew up.
Both of her parents died when she was twelve.
child:
William
She was a native of Trowbridge, Wiltshire, England, the sixth child of William Mortimer, a blacksmith, and of Mary Pierce Mortimer.
Sister:
Catharine
In Mary Mortimer, Catharine Beecher found one of the "original, planning minds" for which she and her sister, Harriet Beecher Stowe, had been looking.
