Peplau, Hildegard E.

Hildegard Elizabeth Peplau, educator and psychiatric nurse, was born in Reading, Pennsylvania, on September 1, 1909, the daughter of Polish and Russian immigrants Gustav and Ottylie Peplau. Gustav Peplau (1882-1949) worked as a fireman at the Reading Railroad yards for 31 years. Ottylie Peplau (1883-1944) maintained the family's home and occasionally worked outside the home as a housekeeper. Over the course of her life, Peplau maintained especially close ties with her siblings, Clara Julianna (1907-1984), Harold Gustav (1911-1985), Walter Carl (1913-1969), Bertha Ottylie (1919-1999), and her foster brother John David Forster (b. 1931).

Educated at local schools, Peplau received a diploma in nursing from Pottstown Hospital Training School in Pennsylvania, in 1931; an A.B. from Bennington College (1943); an A.M. (1947) and Ed.D (1953), both from Teachers' College, Columbia University; and a certificate in Psychoanalysis Applied for Teachers from the William Alanson White Institute (1954). Peplau gave birth to Letitia Anne (Tish) Peplau in 1945 but for personal reasons did not marry Tish's father, Donald M. McIntosh. Eventually, societal pressures influenced her decision to have Tish adopted by her brother Walter. For many years, she presented Tish as her niece so that she could pursue a nursing career without the stigma of being a single parent.

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