Mary Mason Lyon (1797 - 1849)

Born 28 Feb 1797 in Buckland, Massachusetts, United States

Ancestors

Died 5 Mar 1849 at age 52 in South Hadley, Massachusetts, United States

Problems/Questions Profile manager: Luke Lord Kemp-St. Margaret [send private message]

Biography

Mary Lyon is Notable.

Mary Mason Lyon was an American pioneer in women's education. She established the Wheaton Female Seminary in Norton, Massachusetts,(now Wheaton College) in 1834. She then established Mount Holyoke Female Seminary (now Mount Holyoke College) in South Hadley, Massachusetts in 1837 and served as its first president (or "principal") for 12 years. Lyon's vision fused intellectual challenge and moral purpose. She valued socioeconomic diversity and endeavored to make the seminary affordable for students of modest means.

The daughter of a farming family in Buckland, Massachusetts, Lyon had a difficult childhood. Her father died when she was five, and the entire family pitched in to help run the farm. Lyon was thirteen when her mother remarried and moved away; she stayed behind in Buckland in order to keep the house for her brother Aaron, who took over the farm.[1] She attended various district schools intermittently and, in 1814, began teaching in them as well. Lyon's modest beginnings fostered her lifelong commitment to extending educational opportunities to girls from middling and poor backgrounds.

Lyon died of erysipelas (possibly contracted from an ill student in her care)[1] on March 5, 1849. The Mary Lyon dormitories at Miami University, Swarthmore College, University of Massachusetts Amherst and Plymouth State University are named in her memory.

Vassar College, Wellesley College and the former Western College for Women were patterned after Mount Holyoke.[8] Oklahoma's Cherokee Female Seminary (now Northeastern State University) acquired its "first faculty for their female seminary from Mount Holyoke, [and] also used the Massachusetts school as a pattern for the institution they established."[9]

In 1905, Lyon was inducted into the Hall of Fame for Great Americans in the Bronx, New York.

She has been honored by the United States Postal Service with a 2¢ Great Americans series postage stamp.

Sources

See also:

• Wikipedia: Mary Lyon