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Last spring, Flora Slosson Wuellner found a few Cornell-related photographs in her grandmother\u2019s papers and sent them to the University. May Preston Slosson, PhD 1880, had been its first female doctoral graduate\u2014as well as the first woman in the U.S. to earn a PhD in philosophy. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
In an accompanying letter, Wuellner noted Slosson\u2019s years of work as a teacher, chaplain, and suffragist.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cShe was a published poet and painter,\u201d Wuellner wrote. \u201cI remember her well as a gifted woman, powerful and compassionate. She often told me of her love for Cornell and [her professors\u2019] influence on her life. \u2026 Cornell would have been proud of her subsequent history.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div><\/div>\n\n\n\n
Slosson was born in 1858 in Ilion, New York, and grew up on a farm. Her father was a preacher who supported suffrage and higher education for women; her mother, herself a seminary graduate, was a student of languages and an advocate for philosophy and science.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Slosson earned bachelor\u2019s and master\u2019s degrees from Michigan\u2019s Hillsdale College before heading to the Hill to study philosophy. At that time\u2014the late 1800s\u2014graduate degrees were rare in the U.S.: when Cornell awarded its first PhD in 1872 (in mathematics, to Henry Turner Eddy), there were fewer than 200 grad students in the entire country. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
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From its founding, admission to the University had been open to women. Ezra Cornell underscored his commitment to this ideal in a now-famous letter to his four-year-old granddaughter in February 1867, writing: \u201cI want to have girls educated in the university as well as boys, so that they may have the same opportunity to become wise and useful to society that the boys have.\u201d Cornell\u2019s first female student matriculated in fall 1870, and three more entered a year later. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
(Interestingly, the first woman to earn a PhD in the U.S. also has a Big Red connection: Helen Magill White, second wife of founding President Andrew Dickson White, got her doctorate in Greek from Boston University in 1877.)<\/p>\n<\/div><\/div>\n\n\n\n
After Slosson graduated from Cornell\u2014penning a dissertation titled \u201cDifferent Theories of Beauty\u201d\u2014she taught Greek and philosophy at Nebraska\u2019s Hastings College; in 1891 she married Edwin Slosson, a chemistry professor and science journalist, and they both went on to teach at the University of Wyoming in Laramie. As chair of the prison committee of the Woman\u2019s Christian Temperance Union, she began organizing lectures for prisoners at the Wyoming State Penitentiary and was appointed its chaplain in 1899\u2014becoming the first female prison chaplain in the U.S.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
in 1903, the family followed Edwin\u2019s career to New York City, where he worked as a newspaper editor and later helped found Columbia\u2019s journalism school; Slosson became active in the suffrage movement. (She had become accustomed to voting in Wyoming, where women had been casting ballots since 1869, and had enjoyed other rights denied to women in most states at the time.) A collection of her poems, From a Quiet Garden<\/em>, was published in 1920. <\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cI remember her well as a gifted woman, powerful and compassionate.<\/p>Flora Slosson Wuellner<\/strong><\/cite><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n The Slossons later moved to Washington, D.C., where Edwin was director of the Science Service news agency. After his death in 1929, she moved to Ann Arbor, Michigan, to be near her son and his family (another son had died in childhood). She passed away in November 1943 at age 85.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Slosson\u2019s original dissertation is still housed in the University Library\u2014elegantly printed and comprising just 16 pages of close-set text. (According to Elaine Deutsch Engst, MA \u201972, Cornell\u2019s archivist emerita, it\u2019s a typical length for the era.) In it, she explores the \u201cinfinity of beautiful forms\u201d and parses a multitude of writers\u2019 and philosophers\u2019 approach to beauty over the centuries. <\/p>\n\n\n\n She cites Socrates\u2019 exclamation to \u201cseek the true Beauty\u201d and Plato\u2019s lack of a marked distinction between the good and the beautiful; from Goethe to Kant to Hume to Emerson, she explores whether beauty is ordinary or eternal. She states that while many qualities of beauty <\/strong>have been explored, one has been overlooked: its \u201cintoxicating power.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n As she writes: \u201c[W]hen we think through how many avenues of delight Beauty appeals to our aesthetic nature, we no longer wonder that Philosophy became confused and quite lost her usual calm self-control, in wandering through this fascinating labyrinth.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Published October 5, 2021<\/p>\n\n\n\n May Preston Slosson, PhD 1880, was Cornell\u2019s first female doctoral graduate\u2014as well as the first woman in the U.S. to earn a PhD in philosophy.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":67,"featured_media":2142,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"alumni_hub_syml_posts":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[224],"tags":[],"cornell_year_post":[],"post_folder":[],"class_list":["post-626","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-cornelliana"],"yoast_head":"\n
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