Putnam, Emily James (1865–1944)

American author and educator who was the first dean of Barnard College. Born Emily James Smith in Canandaigua, New York, on April 15, 1865; died in Kingston, Jamaica, on September 7, 1944; second daughter and youngest of five children of Judge James Cosslett Smith and Emily Ward (Adams) Smith; Bryn Mawr, A.B., 1889; attended Girton College, Cambridge, 1889–90 (one of the first American women to do so); became the second wife of George Haven Putnam (head of the publishing firm G.P. Putnam's Sons), on April 27, 1899 (died 1930); children: Palmer Cosslett Putnam (b. 1900, an author of scientific and technical works); (stepdaughter) Bertha Haven Putnam (1872–1960).

After graduating with the first class from Bryn Mawr in 1889, Emily James Putnam became a teacher of Greek at the Packer Collegiate Institute in Brooklyn (1891–93), was appointed a fellow in Greek at the University of Chicago (1893–94), and later served as first dean and associate in history at the five-year-old Barnard College, at Columbia University (1894–1900). Over those six years, she succeeded in enhancing Barnard's academic reputation by tightening the connection with Columbia: sharing its professors, libraries, labs, and other facilities.

In April 1899, she married George Haven Putnam, the publisher (and father of Bertha Haven Putnam ), who was 21 years her senior. For some years, Emily Putnam was president of the League for Political Education (1901–04) and vice president and manager of the Women's University Club, New York. Besides translations from the Greek, she is the author of The Lady: Studies of Certain Significant Phases of Her History (1913), which the North American Review once declared to be "the most brilliant book of essays ever written by an American woman." Putnam also helped establish the New School for Social Research in 1919 and was a regular lecturer there. After retiring from Barnard in 1930 following the death of her husband, she went to live in Spain. When civil war broke out there, she moved to Kingston, Jamaica, where she died in 1944.