23 Facts About Grace Macurdy

Grace Harriet Macurdy was an American classicist, and the first American woman to gain a PhD from Columbia University.

Grace Macurdy taught at Vassar College for 44 years, despite a lengthy conflict with Abby Leach, her first employer.

Grace Macurdy shaped the field of classics and the study of ancient history by pulling together both material evidence and textual evidence as sources in her pioneering studies of individual women.

Grace Macurdy went to high school in Watertown, Massachusetts, before studying at Radcliffe College, where she gained highest second-year honors in 1887, and graduated in 1888.

Grace Macurdy would become the first graduate from Radcliffe to gain a doctorate, and become a college professor.

Grace Macurdy was awarded a fellowship from the Woman's Education Association of Boston, which allowed her to study at the University of Berlin from 1899 to 1900, taking classes taught by Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff.

Grace Macurdy gained her PhD from Columbia University in 1903, becoming the first American woman to have gained a PhD from Columbia.

Grace Macurdy's dissertation was titled The Chronology of the Extant Plays of Euripides, and was longer than most dissertations in the subject at that time.

Grace Macurdy's pioneering academic achievements did not have wholly positive results, as her increased success brought her into conflict with the scholar who had first hired her to Vassar, Abby Leach.

In 1907, Grace Macurdy discovered that Leach was attempting to have her dismissed from Vassar.

The trustees of the college rejected Leach's proposal, and unanimously reappointed Grace Macurdy, instructing Leach to give her a reasonable share of the work in the department.

Grace Macurdy continued to remove courses from Macurdy, and to persuade students against courses which Macurdy was teaching, then claiming that Macurdy should be dismissed as she did not have sufficient courses to teach, or sufficient students.

Leach continued her letter-writing, writing to alumnae asking them to criticize Grace Macurdy, and writing further derogatory letters to the president of Columbia and professors of Greek who had taught her there.

However, MacCracken instead proposed the following year that Grace Macurdy should be given a permanent post, and promoted to the rank of full professor, and the trustees agreed.

In 1920, two years after Leach's death, Grace Macurdy became chair of the department of Greek at Vassar, a post which she held until she retired in 1937.

Grace Macurdy continued to be an effective teacher, lecturer, and international traveller, despite the fact that in 1919 she had begun to lose her hearing, a loss which then proceeded rapidly until she was almost entirely deaf by her mid-fifties.

In contrast with Abby Leach, at whose hands she had suffered so much difficulty, Grace Macurdy worked hard to promote the careers and scholarship of other younger female colleagues.

Grace Macurdy recognised the excellence of Lily Ross Taylor's scholarship, and helped foster her career even after she had left Vassar.

Grace Macurdy interceded with President MacCracken on behalf of Elizabeth Hazelton Haight's delayed promotion to full professor, and asked the president of Mount Holyoke College to take care that Cornelia Coulter not 'overburden' herself with teaching, thus making it difficult for her to publish successfully.

Grace Macurdy is recognised for being one of the few early women classicists who, rather than attempting to follow the paths laid out by male scholars and suppress her own gender, established her own approach to academic work.

The study of women was central to her scholarship, and Grace Macurdy was particularly interested in the importance of studying individual women with reference to their social circumstances, rather than allowing generalisation.

Grace Macurdy recognised the need to use a wide range of material evidence in order to move past traditional scholarship, based primarily on the study of texts, and in her works therefore discussed coins, sculpture, vases, inscriptions and papyri.

Grace Macurdy's work had a substantial impact on the study of women and ancient history.