Eliot, Abigail Adams, 1892-1992

Abigail Adams Eliot was born October 9, 1892, in Dorchester, Massachusetts, the youngest child of Reverend Christopher Rhodes Eliot (1856-1945) and Mary Jackson (May) Eliot (1859-1926). Her sister, Martha May Eliot (whose papers are in the Schlesinger Library, MC 229), was head of the Children's Bureau of the U.S. Department of Labor between 1951 and 1956. Her brother, Frederick May Eliot, was head of the Unitarian Association of America starting in 1937 till his death in 1958.

AAE graduated from the Winsor School, a private secondary school in Boston, in 1910 and from Radcliffe College in 1914. She spent the next five years in Boston doing social work: she was a Visitor for Children (1914-1917) for the Children's Mission to Children, and a district secretary (1918) for Associated Charities, now the Family Welfare Society. In 1919-1920 she was a student at Oxford University, and for the last few months of 1920 worked for the Massachusetts Minimum Wage Committee. In 1921 the Woman's Education Association of Boston sent her to England, to study and observe the new nursery school movement as exemplified by the Rachael McMillan Nursery School and Training Centre in London, and to prepare herself to begin such a school in Boston. The nursery school movement in the U.S. began in the three fields of home economics, social work, and education in the early twenties of the century. Early nursery training centers stressed good health and hygiene for children, education for better mothering, and education and habit training through play.

In January 1922, AAE became the first Director of the Ruggles Street Nursery School and Training Center, which was sponsored by the Woman's Education Association and located in the Roxbury section of Boston. From the beginning, Professor George E. Johnson of the Harvard Graduate School of Education served as advisor. AAE became a leading Boston proponent of early childhood education, teaching at her own institution and at Wellesely College and helping to found the Cambridge Nursery School, a cooperative begun in 1923. In her classes and in her frequent talks to parent and church groups she placed a new emphasis on parent education.

In 1926 the name of the School was changed to the Nursery Training School of Boston and the NTS was physically separated from the RSNS, moving to 355 Marlboro St. in Boston. By 1931 the NTS was sending student interns and graduate teachers to forty schools around the country.

Continuing her own education, AAE received her Ed.M. in 1926 and her Ed.D. in 1930, both from the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Recognition of her expertise led the Works Progress Administration in 1933 to appoint AAE to supervise the WPA Nursery Schools in New England.

AAE retired from the NTS in 1952. The previous year she had overseen the school's move to Medford, Massachusetts, and the beginning of its affiliation there with Tufts University. In 1955 the NTS, renamed in honor of AAE and Elizabeth Ware (Winsor) Pearson, who had been head of the NTS Corporation in its early years, became the Eliot-Pearson School for Nursery School and Kindergarten Training. AAE, having served a brief term (1952-1954) as Director of the Teacher Education Division at Pacific Oaks Friends School in Pasadena, California, had returned to the Boston area in 1954 and joined the faculty of the Eliot-Pearson School. In 1965, the former NTS underwent its final transformation: it joined Tufts University as the Eliot-Pearson Department of Child Study.

As early as 1939, when she served as Director of the Lower School of the Church School at the First Church in Cambridge (Unitarian), AAE had expressed a strong interest in religious education for children, an interest she has continued throughout her career. Since her retirement she has served on numerous boards and committees for child guidance and mental health facilities and on the Board of Trustees of Radcliffe College. She also continued to teach at her school and to lecture at other universities and to local organizations. From 1954 to 1975 she was influential in starting and developing what is now the Eliot Community Mental Health Center in Concord, Massachusetts.

AAE never married. She remained close to her sister, Martha May Eliot, all her life and for many years shared a house with Anna E. Holman, whose papers are also in the Schlesinger Library (MC 291).

A leading Boston proponent of early childhood education, Eliot was appointed (1922) the first director of the Ruggles Street Nursery School and Training Center, later the Nusery Training School of Boston and eventually, the Eliot-Pearson Department of Child Study at Tufts University. Educated at Radcliffe, Oxford, and the Harvard Graduate School of Education, Eliot was appointed in 1933 to supervise the WPA Nursery Schools in New England. She retired in 1952, one year after overseeing the move of the Nursery Training School to Tufts, but continued to teach child psychology and parent and religious education.