Read Part One HERE
In this story I will focus on a woman named Betsy Mix Cowles. She lived from 1810 - 1876. Betsy was the eighth child of Giles Hooker Cowles and Sally White Cowles. In 1811 the Cowles family settled in the town of Austinburg in Ashtabula, the most norteastern county in Ohia, where her father was a minister.
In the later 1820s, Betsy and her sister began opening infant schools, advocating the creation of programs to instruct the very young. In 1827 she began teachig in area schools, and in 1832 she studied in New York City, as part of the infant school movement. When Betsy was 28, she was one of the first students in the Ladies Course at Oberlin College and a member of the third graduating class in 1840.
Betsy did not marry and supported herself as a teacher and principal, and as one of the first women to serve as a school superintendent, which was very rare in the mid-19th centurty. She was involved in establishing a number of public schools and normal schools in the Ohio towns of Austinburg, Massillon, Canton, Hopedale and Painesville, as well as in Bloomington Illinois.
Read Part One Hundred And Six HERE
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