Howard, Jennie Eliza (1845–1931)

Jennie Eliza Howard (b. 24 July 1845; d. 29 July 1931), North American schoolteacher and educator. Born in Coldbrook Springs, Massachusetts, Howard studied at the Framingham Normal School and taught in Boston and Worcester, where she became an assistant principal in a boys' school. Howard was an experienced teacher by 1883, when she joined Domingo Faustino Sarmiento's program that brought North American teachers to Argentina. She is the best remembered of the more than eighty-eight teachers who worked in Argentina from 1867 to the turn of the century because she wrote a book about her experiences: In Distant Climes and Other Years (1931). Howard taught or ran schools in Paraná; in Corrientes, where she established a normal school; and in San Nicolás de los Arroyos, at the eastern limit of the pampa. There she was assistant principal of the normal school and head of the model grade school, both of which she established.

Howard retired in 1903, when she lost her voice, but she remained in Argentina where she became the mainstay of the English-speaking community in Buenos Aires. When the government cut all pensions, more than one hundred of Howard's former students organized to get hers restored, and they feted her on her eighty-fifth birthday in a public hall. Her portrait still hangs in the public school she founded in San Nicolás. Howard died in Buenos Aires.

See alsoEducation: Overview; Pampa.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Alice Houston Luiggi, 65 Valiants (1965).

Additional Bibliography

Szurmuk, Mónica, editor. Mujeres en viaje: Escritos y testimonios. Buenos Aires: Aguilar, Altea, Taurus, Alfaguara, 2000.

                                     Georgette Magassy Dorn