Constellation Similarity Assertions

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.

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