How One Female Prof Helped Prepare Women for the Vote

When New York State passed its suffrage bill in 1917, the University was ready to educate the newly enfranchised citizens

She became only the second woman on the faculty to hold an advanced degree, after Rose.

Educated as an economic historian at the Society for the Collegiate Instruction of Women, or “Harvard Annex”—before it became Radcliffe College and offered degrees—Hazard began her career as a history teacher.

Once women could receive degrees, she completed her bachelor’s in history and government in 1907 at age 36 and earned a master’s six years later.

In her second year, she added a “Woman in Industry” course; focused on female occupations and labor conditions, it included field trips to regional businesses like a shoe factory, a mill, and a canning company.

When New York voted in favor of women’s suffrage in November 1917—the first state east of the Mississippi to do so—Hazard urged the department to play a leadership role in civics education, asking Van Rensselaer three key questions:

When Hazard arrived at on the Hill, the battle over women professors was still fresh, and those teaching home economics were cautioned to avoid attending University faculty meetings.

“How shall the New York housekeeper [homemaker] know about her new political duties?”

“How can our home economics department help her to vote intelligently?”

“Can we give a course to our students to prepare them, when they go out as county agents or extension workers, to use the opportunities they meet for influencing and teaching women as voters?”

Hazard’s solution was authoring Civic Duties of Women.

Published in 1918, the 45-page bulletin was distributed to thousands of New Yorkers as part of the Cornell Reading Course for the Farm Home, an extension program aimed at rural women that Van Rensselaer had launched in 1901.

The pamphlet outlined federal, state, and local civics—with lessons on elections, taxes, school systems, international trade, and poverty, as well as recommended books for community civics libraries.

Published in 1918, the 45-page bulletin Civic Duties of Women was distributed to thousands of New Yorkers as part of the Cornell Reading Course for the Farm Home.

As the 19th Amendment moved toward ratification in 1919, Hazard wrote with pride:

“Our department did pioneer emergency work through its staff and the extension agents when the right to vote was first suddenly put into the lives of NY State women, knowing, as we did, that the average farm woman had not had access to many suffragist or political speeches or books and would want to be and need to be an intelligent voter [and] worker in public life.”

As Hazard noted, she’d made sure the bulletin had “no suffragist echo nor any partisan note in it.” And this came in spite of her personal beliefs: at a campus suffrage rally, she’d declared that “Woman has entered the economic and social world; why should she be kept out of the political world?”

In 1919, Hazard launched “Woman and the State,” a new course aimed at preparing female voters that included a field trip to the state capital in Albany.

Woman has entered the economic and social world; why should she be kept out of the political world?

Prof. Blanche Hazard

Meanwhile, she continued her own scholarship, completing a PhD thesis through Radcliffe on the economic history of the Massachusetts boot and shoe industry.

Although she never took the requisite exams to complete the degree, her dissertation became the first book by a woman to be published by Harvard University Press.

Hazard was one of 21 members (and two women) on an influential National Education Association committee whose 1916 report popularized the term “social studies” and created the field’s foundational curriculum.

While Hazard’s time at Cornell was brief—she married and departed in 1921—her legacy is enduring.

Through innovative courses and outreach, she brought progressive ideas into the classroom and prepared a generation of women for a widening array of careers as engaged citizens.

Hazard helped lay the groundwork for Human Ecology’s commitment to public impact and anticipated the ILR School’s focus on work and the workplace—teaching courses that may have felt right at home a half-century later, when Cornell founded the second women’s studies program in the country.

An expert on Big Red lore, Corey Ryan Earle ’07 teaches “The First American University,” a wildly popular spring semester course on Cornell history.

Top: The home economics faculty in 1918–19. (All images courtesy of Rare and Manuscript Collections.)

Published March 16, 2026

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