This post adds a few details to Claire H. Hammond’s sketch of the life and brief academic career of the second woman to have received a Ph.D. in economics in the United States (note: Sarah Scovill Whittelsey tied for second place with Hannah Robie Sewall at the University of Minnesota). A link to Whittelsey’s 1894 Radcliffe portrait, note of her success in women’s college tennis, testimony before the U.S. House of Representatives, and her newspaper obituary are among the tidbits to be found below.
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Life and Career of Sarah Scovill Whittelsey
Claire H. Hammond. American Women and the Professionalization of Economics. Review of Social Economy. Vol. 51, No. 3 (Fall 1993), 347-370. (here pp. 362-366)
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1892, College women’s tennis champion
The first intercollegiate tennis invitational for women is held at Bryn Mawr College. Radcliffe College’s Sarah Whittelsey wins the tournament. Vassar, Wellesley, and Smith Colleges turn down the invitation; many faculty members fear women cannot handle the competitive nature of sports.
Source: From the milestone timeline at the ITA Hall of Fame.
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1898, Yale Ph.D.
Sarah Scovill Whittelsey (Mrs. Percy T. Walden), B.A. Radcliffe College. In how far has Massachusetts labor legislation been in accordance with teachings of economic theory? Ann. Amer. Acad. Pol. and Soc Sci., Supplement, 1901, 1:1-157. 210 St. Ronan St., New Haven, Conn.
Source: Doctors of Philosophy of Yale University With the Titles of Their Dissertations, 1861-1927. New Haven, p. 65.
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President Hadley’s Introduction
to the published dissertation
Amid the many things which are valuable in the earlier reports of the Massachusetts Labor Bureau, none possess more permanent importance than the dispassionate analyses of the effects of labor laws which were prepared by Colonel Wright and his associates. The investigation of the workings of the ten-hour law in Massachusetts mills is a historic example of economic study which is as good as anything of its kind that has been done in the United States. But in more recent years the work of the Massachusetts Bureau has run in somewhat different channels. It has been to some degree crowded out of the fields of legislative investigation by the mass of purely statistical work which has been entrusted to its charge. And while the activity of its former chief is continued in his work as the head of the United States Bureau of Labor, the very breadth of the investigations which he is conducting forbids that complete treatment of any one field of legislation which was possible in his earlier labors.
Under these circumstances, the economic effects of Massachusetts labor legislation as they had worked themselves out in recent years seemed an appropriate subject for a thesis for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy at Yale. In her treatment of this theme Miss Whittelsey has presented the subject under three distinct aspects: an analysis, a history, and a criticism. Her analysis shows what is the present condition of the Massachusetts statute books on the various subjects connected with labor. The history shows when these statues were passed, and what were the motives and causes which led to their passage. The criticism undertakes to show what have been the effects, economic, social and moral, of the various forms of statutory regulation.
In a field of this kind it is hardly to be expected that the results will be startling. If they were, the method and the impartiality of the thesis would be open to great distrust. It is for the serious student of legislation rather than for the doctrinaire or the agitator that a painstaking criticism of this kind is intended. It has special value at the present day, when so many other states are following the example of Massachusetts in this line, and when there is a tendency to introduce similar methods of regulation into other departments of economic life besides those which are involved in the contract between the employer and the wage earner. Whether this tendency is to be regarded as a good or an evil thing is a matter of opinion on which thoughtful men differ; but there can be no question among thoughtful men of all parties that the maximum of good and the minimum of evil are to be obtained by studying dispassionately the results of past experience before we make experiments in new fields.Arthur T. Hadley.
Yale University.Source: Ann. Amer. Acad. Pol. and Soc Sci., Supplement, 1901, 1:5-6.
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CALLED TO WELLESLEY.
Miss Sarah Scovill Whittelsey Will Probably Accept.
NEW HAVEN. Jan 16—Miss Sarah Scovill Whittelsey of this city has been offered the chair of political economy at Wellesley college for one year. She has been summoned to Boston for a conference with the Wellesley authorities relative to the offer. She is to take the place of Miss Balch, who will leave Wellesley next fall to go to Europe for her Sabbatical year. Miss Whittelsey will, it is understood, accept the position.
She is the daughter of Joseph T. Whittelsey of this city, of national prominence as an authority in tennis, golf and college sports.
Source: The Boston Globe, 17 January 1902, p. 8.
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Sarah Scovill Whittelsey (Mrs. Percy T. Walden)
B.A. Radcliffe College 1894.
Miss Whittelsey received her Doctor’s degree in 1898. During the year 1902-1903 she was Instructor in Economics at Wellesley College.
In 1905 she married Percy T. Walden, Ph.D. Yale 1896, now Professor of Chemistry in the University. They have two children, Sarah Scovill, born in 1906, and Joseph Whittelsey, born in 1911.
Since 1914 Mrs. Walden has served on the New Haven Board of Education.
Her dissertation was published in 1901, in the Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, Supplement I, under the title “Massachusetts Labor Legislation : An Historical and Critical Study.”
Her present address is 210 St. Ronan Street, New Haven, Connecticut.
Source: Alumnae Graduate School, Yale University. 1894-1920 (New Haven: Yale University, 1920), pp. 46-47.
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Statement of Mrs. Percy T. Walden, New Haven, Conn., Chairman of Child Welfare, National League of Women Voters
Source: Hearing before the Committee on Interstate and Foreign Commerce, House of Representatives. Seventieth Congress, Second Session. H.R. 14070 to provide a child welfare extension service and for other purposes. Washington, D.C.: January 24 and 25, 1929. Pages 86-87.
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Obituary
Mrs. Sarah Walden.
New Haven, Aug. 7. — (AP.) — Mrs. Sarah Walden, 73, former economics teacher at Wellesley College, first woman member of the New Haven Board of Education and founder and long time president of the Connecticut Child Welfare Association, died at a hospital here yesterday after a short illness. She was the widow of Professor Percv T. Walden of Yale University.
Mrs. Walden. who was born In Paris but spent nearly all her here, was graduated from Radcliffe College in 1894, the year she won the women’s intercollegiate tennis championship at Byrn Mawr, Pa. She was a trustee of Wellesley College. She leaves a son, Joseph Walden of Elizabeth, N.J.; a daughter, Mrs. Richmond H. Curtiss of New Haven, and a sister, Mrs. Frank Dunn Berrien of New Haven.
Source: Hartford Courant. August 8, 1945, page 5
Image Source: Radcliffe Archives. Portrait of Sarah Scovill Whittelsey by James Notman. Radcliffe College, Class of 1894.