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.

In 1930, Ada Louise Comstock invited her to head the Appointment Bureau at Radcliffe. Challenged by shrinking job opportunities, EGS introduced vocational programs to give students training in marketable skills: the summer secretarial course, waitress course, and counselling and camp handicrafts course. She created the Summer Playgroup, which employed students under a professional director, and began the Publishing Procedures Course in 1936 and the Training Course in Personnel Administration in 1937. EGS served as Director of the Training Course until 1941. Its scope expanded until, in 1962, it merged with the Harvard Business School.

Formal retirement from Radcliffe in 1954 opened a new range of activities for EGS. In 1955-1959 she volunteered at the Peter Bent Brigham Hospital. Beginning in 1959 she spent six montlss of every year in England, living with friends at the Manor House, Dorchester, Oxfordshire. She founded the American Friends of Dorchester Abbey, which raised money for the conversion of the Cloister Garden into an Anglo-American Garden, to restore the great Jesse window in the East End, to erect a memorial to Sir Winston Churchill, and to restore the fabric of the Abbey. She created and ran a gift shop in the old monastic guest house, and was instrumental in arranging a Festal Evensong attended by Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother, in 1970. In appreciation of her efforts her English friends had her likeness carved on a corbel at Dorchester Abbey, and in 1976 she was awarded an honorary O.B.E.

After retirement, EGS also had time for writing. Her Dorchester Abbey Journals were copied and circulated among the American Friends. Besides an unpublished autobiography, she wrote numerous works that were published: A Monastery Guest House Cookbook (1965, with nine subsequent editions), A Yankee in an English Village (1972), Anglo/American Double Talk (1972), Finger Prints, and many articles. She also wrote stories, religious pieces, poems, and essays on old age that were not published but that are in this collection. Menieres disease and deafness prevented her from travel at the end of her life and she spent her last years in Sherrill House, an Episcopal nursing home in Boston. She died on July 16, 1978.

From the guide to the Papers, 1833, 1913-1978, (Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute)