Talbot, Marion (1858–1948)

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Talbot, Marion (1858–1948)

American university dean, professor of household administration, and social reformer who cofounded the American Association of University Women. Born on July 31, 1858, in Thun, Switzerland; died of chronic myocarditis on October 20, 1948, in Chicago, Illinois; daughter of Israel Tisdale Talbot (a university dean) and Emily (Fairbanks) Talbot (an education reformer); educated in private schools; Boston University, B.A., 1880; Massachusetts Institute of Technology, B.S., 1888.

The eldest of six children (two of whom died in infancy), Marion Talbot was born in Thun, Switzerland, in 1858, while her parents were traveling in Europe. Her father Israel Talbot was a practitioner of homeopathic medicine and the first dean of the Boston University Medical School. Her mother Emily Talbot was an education reformer, a champion of college preparatory courses for women who helped establish the Girls' Latin School in Boston. Marion grew up in Boston in an atmosphere of good works and social reform.

Because public secondary education for college preparation was not readily available to young women, Marion was educated privately at Chauncy Hall School and Girls' High School. She traveled abroad to study languages and was privately tutored in Greek and Latin. Conditionally admitted to Boston University, she earned a bachelor of arts degree in 1880. After college, Talbot traveled and became interested in a newly established field, the applied science of sanitation. Inspired by a family friend, Ellen Swallow Richards , who was pioneering this field at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Talbot enrolled there in 1881. Although she left after one semester, she returned in 1884 and received a B.S. in 1888.

During this period, Talbot, her mother Emily, Richards, Alice Freeman Palmer , and other women interested in the education of women organized the Association of Collegiate Alumnae to unite women dispersed throughout the nation, to establish standards for women's advanced education, and to provide fellowships for women graduate students. Talbot was the organization's first secretary and later president from 1895 to 1897. This organization eventually became the American Association of University Women.

Talbot was also interested in the application of science to the running of the home and was involved in the emerging field called domestic science. In 1887, she and Richards co-edited Home Sanitation: A Manual for Housekeepers, and in 1890, with the assistance of her friend Alice Palmer, she was appointed instructor in domestic science at Wellesley College.

In 1892, the president of the University of Chicago invited Palmer to create and direct a new program for women. She accepted under the condition that Talbot accompany and assist her. Thus Talbot became dean of undergraduate women and assistant professor of sanitary science in the department of social science and anthropology. In 1895, she was appointed associate professor, and four years later became dean of women for the university. In 1905, she was made a full professor in the department of household administration, which she created and which included Alice Peloubet Norton and Sophonisba P. Breckinridge .

In her role as dean of women, Talbot was responsible for living conditions of the women students at the university, and she interpreted this as a mission to change the conventional life of women to include education for entering society. Society was defined by her as both the social obligations women assumed as well as the world at large, where educated women would participate toward its betterment. Talbot developed a system of dormitories organized as residential clubs for women. They had a director, a hospitality program, were self-governing, and emulated the attractions of a private home. To support these dormitory facilities, Talbot organized the Woman's Union in 1901 and a clubhouse with exercise facilities for women. While promoting living conditions for university women and objecting to academic discrimination based on gender, she firmly opposed the establishment of national sororities at the University of Chicago.

Talbot wrote in both her fields of interest, as an administrator of women's education and as a pioneer in the field of domestic science. Her writings combined science and reform. Her first published study, coauthored with Richards, was Food as a Factor in Student Life (1894), a practical study of diet in the women's dormitories. In The Education of Women (1910) and The Modern Household (1912), coauthored with Breckinridge, she critiqued the education of women in a changing technological society. Talbot believed that, although the home would always be the place for most women to exercise their influence on society, the traditional household was obsolete and efforts to perpetuate it useless. The modern household, according to Talbot, was a complex entity requiring the skills of a woman educated in administration and capable of exerting her influence upon the home—the central unit of society with a woman as its focal point.

In addition to her university responsibilities, Talbot participated in the Lake Placid conferences that led to the establishment of the Home Economics Association in 1908. Retiring in 1925, she served as acting president of Constantinople Woman's College in Turkey from 1927 to 1928 and from 1931 to 1932. She died in Chicago in 1948 of chronic myocarditis and was buried in Oak Woods Cemetery.