Aurelia Henry Reinhardt

Aurelia Isabel Henry Reinhardt (April 1, 1877 – January 28, 1948) was an American educator, activist, and prominent member and leader of numerous organizations. She completed her undergraduate studies at the University of California, Berkeley, her doctoral dissertation at Yale, and studied as a fellow at Oxford. After teaching at the University of Idaho, the Lewiston State Normal School, and with the Extension Division of the University of California, Reinhardt was elected president of Mills College in 1916, and held the position until 1943, making her the longest serving president in the history of the school.

Reinhardt was a peace activist during the First World War, an active member of the Republican Party, and supported the ratification of the Treaty of Versailles as well as the formation of the League of Nations. She wrote and spoke extensively throughout the US and Europe, to a range of social, political and business groups, on topics including the education of women, women's suffrage, world peace, and international cooperation. Reinhardt was president of the American Association of University Women, and a prominent member of the American Unitarian Association, serving for two years as its first female moderator. As the only female member of the Unitarian Commission of Appraisal, she delivered the Ware Lecture in 1932, and was briefly a minister in Oakland, California. She was a director of the Starr King School for the Ministry, and was a delegate at the inaugural meeting of the United Nations in 1945.

Aurelia Henry Reinhardt was married to George F. Reinhardt in 1909. They had two sons, whom she raised after his unexpected death in 1914. Following her retirement in 1943, she traveled internationally before returning to California, where she died on January 28, 1948, due to heart problems. A lifelong advocate for the marginalized and dispossessed, she was the recipient of honorary degrees from a number of educational institutions, and has been commemorated through the establishment of a society, fellowship, a university building, and a professorship bearing her name. She was named nationally as "one of the ten outstanding women of 1940," and honored as the California State Mother in 1946.

Early life Aurelia Isabel Henry was born on April 1, 1877, in San Francisco, California. The second of six children, she was the daughter of Mary and William Warner Henry, a wholesale grocer, land owner, and businessman. She spent part of her childhood in San Jacinto and Escondido, California. After graduating from Boys High School in San Francisco in 1888, she studied at the University of California, Berkeley, completing a bachelor's degree with a major in English literature in 1898.

She completed a Ph.D. in literature at Yale in 1905 with a doctoral dissertation on Epicoene, or the Silent Woman by Ben Jonson. (One modern source from the Greenwich Historical Society records her as the first female doctoral graduate from Yale, while another from the Special Collections Department in the F.W.) Olin Library at Mills College records her as "one of a handful of women to attend graduate school at Yale University". She then returned to teaching in Idaho for another three years. The two were wed in 1909, in a ceremony at the Unitarian Universalist Church of Berkeley. He later died unexpectedly in 1914, following an "operation for a minor affliction" and four days of illness. (At least one source records George Reinhardt's cause of death as "blood poisoning", possibly a reference to sepsis.)

Career

Because wars are spreading over the planet, destroying men and their achievements, increased effort must be made to assure the development of intelligence and strengthening of character and to utilize every influence making for stability, justice, creativity, and that kind of dwelling together and working together which is crammed into the dynamic monosyllable peace. Universities are such an influence. Women might be.—Aurelia Henry Reinhardt, Women in the American University, 1941 Arriving with her two young children, Reinhardt is said to have remarked that she was "the first college president who arrived on campus pushing a perambulator". During her tenure Mills constructed 17 additional buildings (growing from 11 to 28 total), increased enrollment three-fold in 15 years,According to one source, Mills College had an enrollment of 153 in the 1915 to 1916 school-year, and that figure had risen to 624 by 1927 "and remained at this level twenty-nine years afterward." In 1919 she served the Oakland Chamber of Commerce as chair of the City Planning Committee, and she was regularly invited to speak at a range of organizations, such as the Retail Furniture Association of California, the Western Fruit Jobbers Association, the San Francisco Chamber of Commerce, and the Advertising Club of Los Angeles.

Starting in the First World War, Reinhardt worked as an advocate for world peace. She supported Democratic President Woodrow Wilson's proposal to create the League of Nations, despite herself being active in the Republican Party. In total, she was a member of more than a dozen peace organizations over the course of her career. She served as vice president, and then in 1923, president of the Association, a position she held until 1927, helping to strengthen that organization significantly. She continued her work with the Association of University Women into the 1930s, as chair of their Committee on International Relations from 1927 to 1933, also held the chair for the General Federation of Women's Clubs in their Department of Education from 1928 to 1930.

Reinhardt was a devoted and active Unitarian throughout her life.

In 2019, the Redwood Regional Park in the San Francisco Bay Area was renamed Dr. Aurelia Reinhardt Redwood Regional Park in honor of her efforts in helping to establish the East Bay Regional Park District.

Selected publications

Henry Reinhardt, Aurelia (1928). "Opportunities Girl Scouting Offers College Women for Volunteer Leadership". Girl Scouts, Inc.