Alice Gordon Gulick

Alice Gordon Gulick, from a posthumous biography published in 1917. Alice Gordon Gulick (August 8, 1847 — September 14, 1903) was an American missionary teacher in Spain.

Early life Alice Winfield Gordon was born in Boston, Massachusetts, and raised in Auburndale, Massachusetts, the daughter of James M. Gordon and Mary Clarkson Gordon. Her parents were active in the abolition movement; her sisters Anna Adams Gordon and Elizabeth Putnam Gordon were temperance activists. She attended Mount Holyoke Seminary from 1863 to 1867.

Career

Alice Gordon Gulick became a missionary in Spain soon after marrying her second husband, William Hooker Gulick, in 1871. His parents, Peter Johnson Gulick and Fanny Gulick, were missionaries in the Hawaiian Kingdom.

Alice and William ran an elementary school at Santander, Spain, then at San Sebastián, and a boarding school to train older girls to be teachers. Alice Gulick translated Protestant hymns into Spanish, and carried many of her ideas about women's education from her time at Mount Holyoke, encouraging her students to pursue further studies.

The Gulicks moved their women's college, the Instituto Internacional, to Madrid in 1903, but Alice Gulick was already ill with tuberculosis when that move was undertaken, and she did not live to see the school's success at its new location.

A building on the campus was named for Alice Gordon Gulick in 1910.

Personal life

Alice Gordon married an Amherst College instructor, Alva Bayless Kittredge, in 1870; he died the next day, from tuberculosis.

Alice Gordon Gulick died in London in 1903, aged 56 years. Her grave is in Madrid. Her sister Elizabeth Putnam Gordon published a biography of Alice Gordon Gulick in 1917, including a poem dedicated to Gulick by Katharine Lee Bates. Her institute remains in Madrid, as a center of cultural exchange and as a historic site. There is also a park named for her in San Sebastián.