Rather, Ethel Zivley

Texas historian Ethel Zivley Rather (1881-1967) grew up in Gonzales, Texas. In 1902, she graduated from the University of Texas with a B.A. in history. Awarded a fellowship, she went on to get her master’s in history from UT in 1903. She was subsequently a Fellow in American History at Cornell from 1905 to 1906, then the Buckley Fellow in History at Yale from 1906 to 1907. She received her Ph.D. in history from Yale in 1908. Her master’s thesis, DeWitt’s Colony, and her Ph.D. thesis, Recognition of the Republic of Texas by the United States, were published by both the University of Texas and the Texas State Historical Association, of which she became a fellow and, eventually, executive council member. From 1911 to 1912, she was the Director of Women’s Religious Studies at Columbia University.

In 1915, Rather married Ernest Joseph Villavaso, a professor in UT’s Department of Romance Languages. They donated their property on Duval St. in Austin to the Episcopal Theological Seminary of the Southwest, where a chapel was built and dedicated in 1966 to the couple’s only child, Ernest Jr., who died in 1947 at age 29.

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