Born: 9 October 1892, United States
Died: 29 October 1992
Country most active: United States
Also known as: NA
The following is republished with permission from the Boston Women’s Heritage Trail.
Martha May Eliot was a daughter of Christopher Eliot, a minister at the First Parish Church of Meeting House Hill, and Mary Jackson May. Martha was a highly respected pediatrician and an acclaimed leader in the field of public health. Her sister, Abigail Adams Eliot, excelled in the field of education. They were the granddaughters of Martha and Frederick May noted for their dedication to Dorchester’s Industrial School for Girls.
Abigail Adams Eliot also attended Radcliffe College and then served as a social worker for five years after graduation. She became disillusioned with the field and decided to continue her studies, first at Oxford University and later at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, where she earned her doctorate in 1930. Specializing in early childhood education, she helped create the National Association for Nursery Education, served as an advisor to the Roosevelt administration’s depression era nursery schools for poor children, and a consultant for a program to provide day care to working families contributing to the war effort during World War II.
During the 1950s, she became involved with the Tufts University establishment of what became known as the Eliot-Pearson School. She continued teaching at various institutions including Pacific Oaks College in Pasadena, California. Her former Radcliffe classmate, Anna E. Holman, also a teacher as well as a poet, was her lifelong partner. The couple lived together in Concord until Anna’s death in 1969. Abigail died at age 100 after a life of service to the education of young children, a field that she helped establish.