Edith Gratia Stedman, 1888-1978

EGS, social worker and college administrator, was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on December 29, 1888, the daughter of George Herbert and Gratia (Holt) Stedman. The family moved to Belmont, Massachusetts, where EGS attended high school. She was graduated from Radcliffe in 1910 and then worked for Jessie Hodder in the Social Service Department of the Massachusetts General Hospital. In 1911, when Hodder was appointed Superintendent of the Framingham Reformatory for Women, EGS went with her and became Head of the Social Service Department there. She resigned under pressure from her brother and for two years, 1915-1917, ran a candy store in Boston.

In 1917 she and two friends, Margaret Deland and Sylvia Anable, volunteered for service overseas; she served as a canteen worker with the Young Men's Christian Association in France and occupied Germany until 1919. In 1920 she went overseas again, as a medical social worker in the Episcopal Mission of the Diocese of Hankow, under Bishop Logan Roots, in Wu Chang, China. The eruption of civil war there in 1927 forced her to leave. On her return to Boston she was offered a position as executive secretary at the Judge Baker Foundation, the guidance clinic for children.

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