Dummer, Ethel Sturges, 1866-1954

Ethel (Sturges) Dummer, a social welfare leader, philanthropist and author, was born in Chicago in 1866, the oldest of six daughters and third of nine children born to Mary (Delafield) Sturges and George Sturges. She graduated in 1885 from the Kirkland School in Chicago but continued to be involved with the social welfare concerns of the school through the Kirkland Alumnae Association.

In 1888, Ethel Sturges married William Francis Dummer (1851-1928). A prominent Chicago banker, William Dummer was also active in local social welfare and conservation organizations. The Dummers had four daughters, and one son who died in infancy.

Dummer's early interest in local reform was prompted largely by her acquaintance with such reform leaders as Ellen Gates Starr, Mary E. MacDowell and Allen B. Pond. A growing interest in child labor reform led her in 1905 to join the National Child Labor Committee and the Chicago Juvenile Protective Association. In 1908 she became a founder and trustee of the Chicago School of Civics and Philanthropy, later the University of Chicago School of Social Service Administration.

Beginning with financial support for a lecture series for this school, Dummer continued for the rest of her life to underwrite the efforts of local and national reformers. Her philanthropy extended to projects such as the Juvenile Psychopathic Institute (1909); work with prostitutes and unwed mothers during World War I; support (c. 1919-1920) for El Retiro, a girls' detention home in Los Angeles directed by penologist Miriam Van Waters, and the latter's published studies of delinquent girls (1922 and 1925). During the Depression, she helped finance several other private studies of adolescents. She and her daughter, Ethel Dummer Mintzer, director of the Francis W. Parker School in San Diego, worked together closely in the promotion of "Boole Blocks," a mathematical teaching aid developed by EDM and named after Mary Everest Boole, whose ideas about unconscious behavior are discussed in Dummer's Mary E. Boole: A Pioneer Student of the Unconscious (1945). In 1940 she received an honorary degree from Northwestern University and subsequently sponsored child development courses there.

Other writings by Dummer include her autobiography, Why I Think So--The Autobiography of an Hypothesis (1937); prefaces to The Unadjusted Girl by William I. Thomas (1923), The Unconscious: A Symposium (1928), and The Collected Works of Mary Everest Boole (1931); The Evolution of a Biological Faith (1943); and What is Thought? (1945).

For the last seven years of her life she lived with her daughter Katharine Dummer Fisher in Winnetka, Illinois. She died there in 1954.