Patrick, Mary Mills (1850–1940)

views updated

Patrick, Mary Mills (1850–1940)

American educator and missionary. Born on March 10, 1850, in Canterbury, New Hampshire; died on February 25, 1940, in Palo Alto, California; oldest of six children of John Patrick (a farmer) and Harriet (White) Patrick; graduated from Lyons Collegiate Institute, 1869; University of Iowa, M.A., 1890; University of Bern, Ph.D., 1897; honorary LL.D. from Smith College, 1914; honorary Litt.D. from Columbia University, 1922.

Appointed as a teacher at a mission school in Erzurum (1871); transferred to American High School for Girls in Constantinople (1875); became co-principal (1883) and then sole principal of the American High School (1889); converted the school into the American College for Girls and served as its first president until her retirement (1890–1924).

Born in 1850, Mary Mills Patrick grew up on a farm in North Boscawen, New Hampshire, before her family moved to a farm in Iowa when she was 15. Her mother was descended from members of the Plymouth Colony, and her father, a farmer whose own father had been a longtime Congregationalist minister, encouraged an atmosphere of learning in their home; Patrick's brother George would become a professor of philosophy and psychology, and Patrick herself would become an educator.

Patrick graduated from Lyons Collegiate Institute in 1869, and two years later accepted a teaching appointment from the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions in Erzurum, in what is now eastern Turkey. During the four years she taught there, she traveled on horseback some 3,000 miles through the countryside and learned both ancient and modern Armenian. In 1875, she transferred to the American High School for Girls in Constantinople (now Istanbul), where she would spend the rest of her teaching career. In 1883, Patrick became co-principal of the school, which mostly enrolled students from the Ottoman Empire's minority Christian populations, and was named sole principal six years later. During this time, she learned Turkish and also Greek, through spending her summers in nearby Greek villages.

In the late 1880s, with plans to convert the high school into a college, Patrick returned to the United States to study at the University of Iowa, from which she received a master's degree in 1890. She secured a college charter from the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, and upon her return to Constantinople used it to transform the American High School for Girls into the American College for Girls, of which she was appointed president. The school was more commonly known as Constantinople Women's College, and enrolled more than 250 students each year.

During summer breaks, Patrick studied in Heidelberg, Zürich, Berlin, Leipzig, and Paris, eventually earning a Ph.D. from the University of Bern in 1897. Her thesis, Sexus Empiricus and Greek Scepticism, was published in 1899. A continuing interest in Greek culture and philosophy would lead her to write another book on Greek thought, Sappho and the Island of Lesbos, in 1912, and The Greek Skeptics in 1929.

When a fire destroyed the college in 1905, a new site was purchased in Arnavutköyü, on the European shore of the Bosporus. The college cut all ties to the mission board in 1908, when a new charter was granted, and moved onto its new campus in 1914. The American College for Girls survived the Balkan Wars and World War I, and after the secular Turkish republic rose from the ashes of the Ottoman Empire the school played an important role in the education of young Turkish women. The international student body numbered over 400 in 1924, when Patrick retired. She returned to America and lived in New York City, where she devoted her time to writing. Her last books were Under Five Sultans, a history and memoir published in 1929, and A Bosporus Adventure, a history of the college published in 1934. Two years later she moved to Palo Alto, California, where she lived until her death of coronary occlusion, at age 90, in 1940. Her ashes were buried in her hometown of Canterbury, New Hampshire.