Brooks, Jane K. 1921-2013

Jane Kochmann Brooks was born in the Bronx on February 5, 1921. She attended Walton High School, learning French and Latin, and earned a BA cum laude in English literature from Smith College in 1942, where she was a member of German House. In 1943, she added an MA in English and Philosophy, also from Smith. Her love of literature, the arts and humanities together with her commitment to the education and advancement of women characterized her throughout her life. Both in her education and throughout her life, her most extraordinary characteristic was her ability to remember and draw on not only the thousands of books read, exhibits visited and performances experienced, but also the personal details of the people she encountered: their faces, histories, and relationships. As a result she was both a beloved and effective teacher and the center of a huge circle of friends of all ages which stretched across the world.

She married classicist Robert A. Brooks in 1943, and settled in Cambridge MA in 1946, where she completed part of a PhD program in English at Harvard and obtained a teaching certificate. Juggling family responsibilities and professional aspirations in an era when commercial day-care was neither widely available nor socially supported, she taught elementary school at Lesley Ellis, and then English part-time at the Winsor School and Pine Manor College, while also working as an editor and research assistant at Harvard and elsewhere. She and her husband were involved in starting and sustaining the Poet's Theater, which sponsored dramatic readings and plays by poets such as W.B.Yeats, Dylan Thomas, and others; they also helped produce and direct an early performance of the medieval Play of Daniel at the Boston Arts Festival and Randall Thompson's The Nativity According to St Luke for the 200th anniversary of Christ Church in Cambridge, both in 1961. In 1965, she moved with her husband to Washington where he was Assistant Secretary of the Army and later Under Secretary of the Smithsonian and where she taught English composition and literature at National Cathedral School and American University. She also organized and contributed to Washington Opportunities for Women: A Guide to Part-Time Work and Study for Educated Women, aimed at women reentering the work force while or after raising families. Her interests in the arts and literature led her to learn calligraphy and join the Washington Calligraphers Guild, to acquire sufficient fluency in ancient Greek to read the New Testament in the original, and to serve as Director of Kinesis, a non-profit dance group. She wrote a large number of poems, gave public readings and published poems in The Christian Science Monitor and The Living Church. Her beautifully addressed letters and annual Christmas poems in several calligraphic styles were appreciated as works of art as well as for their content; the latter were exhibited at Harvard in 1994.

After her first husband's death in 1976, she returned to full-time work in various capacities: interviewer on the hill for the Louis Harris poll, White House Office of Communications, publicity manager at the Textile Museum and for many years, a real estate agent with H.A. Gill and Sons. She was elected to the Literary Society of Washington DC , where she served as corresponding secretary for many years and continued to participate in activities of the Smithsonian Women's Committee, especially its annual Washington Crafts Show, and Smithsonian Friends of Music through the year of her death. A devoted alumna of Smith, she continued to promote women's educational and employment equity throughout her life, in collaboration with Smith contemporaries Betty Friedan, Julia Child and others. In 1989, she married Samuel H. Beer, a former Cambridge neighbor and Eaton Professor of the Science of Government at Harvard, and the couple divided their time between Washington and Cambridge until the year following his death in 2009. She died on August 10, 2013.