Helen Brewster Owens

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Helen Brewster Owens (born April 2, 1881 in Pleasanton (California) , † June 6, 1968 in Martinsburg (West Virginia) ) was an American mathematician , university teacher and suffragette.

Life and research

Brewster Owens was born to a schoolteacher and president of the Linn County Women's Suffrage Association, which sparked her interest in women 's suffrage as a young child when she accompanied her mother to the county fair in 1893. She received her bachelor's degree from the University of Kansas in 1900 and her master's degree in mathematics the following year. While studying at the University of Kansas, she also taught math at Lawrence High School, Kansas . In 1904 she married her fellow student, the mathematician Frederick William Owens, with whom she moved to Chicago, where their first daughter was born in 1905. She continued her studies at the University of Chicago with her husband . A second daughter was born in 1908 and she received her doctorate in mathematics from Cornell University in 1910 with Virgil Snyder with the dissertation: Conjugate Line Congruences of the Third Order Defined by a Family of Quadrics. From 1910 to 1912 she taught mathematics at the preparatory school of the University of Ithaca and in 1914 she became an assistant professor of mathematics at Wells College in Aurora, Cayuga County, New York . From 1917 to 1922 she was a lecturer at Cornell University . In 1926, her husband was appointed director of the math department at Pennsylvania State University , and the family moved to Pennsylvania. In 1935 she was named co-editor of the American Mathematical Monthly and from 1941 until her retirement in 1949 she taught as an assistant professor at Pennsylvania State University. Little is known about her life after retirement. Frederick Owens died in 1961, and she died in Martinsburg, West Virginia in 1969.

Work on women's suffrage

She followed in her mother's footsteps and began her suffrage work around 1909. In 1910, she was elected chairman of the Resolutions Committee of the New York State Woman Suffrage Association. In 1911 she returned to Kansas and spoke about women's election programs at rallies. Shortly after her return to Ithaca, Anna Howard Shaw , president of the National American Woman Suffrage Association , asked her to return to Kansas as her personal representative. She stayed in Kansas in 1912 and spoke in 96 of the 105 state counties. Kansas voters passed the franchise change by 16,000 votes, the largest majority any state voted for the change to date. From 1913 to 1915 she worked for the adoption of the electoral law change in New York State. The change was rejected in New York in 1915, but Carrie Chapman Catt led a second campaign that won the required votes in that state in 1917.

In 1936 Owens began her extensive research on women in math and science. For a section meeting of the American Mathematical Society at Pennsylvania State University in 1937, she organized a meeting to honor the women who had pioneered the research of mathematics. Guests of honor were Winifred Edgerton Merrill , Mary Winston Newson , Clara Eliza Smith and Clara Latimer Bacon . As part of her research, she sent out a questionnaire to many of the women with a PhD in mathematics, and sent a second questionnaire in 1940 with a letter requesting copies of the research for both the Centennial Congress for Women and the World Center for Women's Archives. Much of this material, as well as other articles by her on the suffrage movement, are now available from the Schlesinger Library on Women's History in America at Radcliffe College .

Memberships

Publications (selection)

  • 1902: Brewster, HB: On collineations of space which leave invariant a quadric surface. Kansas Univ. Sci. Bull. 1.
  • 1913: Conjugate line congruences of the third order defined by a family of quadrics. Amer. J. Math. 35.
  • 1936: with FW Owens. A directory of mathematics clubs in colleges and universities of the United States and Canada. Amer. Math. Monthly 43.
  • 1936: with FW Owens: Kappa Mu Epsilon. Amer. Math. Monthly 43.
  • 1936: with FW Owens. Kappa Mu Epsilon of Northeastern Teachers College, Oklahoma. Amer. Math. Monthly 43.

Web links

personal data
SURNAME Brewster Owens, Helen
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Brewster, Helen Barten (maiden name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American mathematician, university professor, and women's rights activist
DATE OF BIRTH April 2, 1881
PLACE OF BIRTH Pleasanton (California)
DATE OF DEATH June 6, 1968
Place of death Martinsburg, West Virginia