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The
English department has enjoyed the services of more women teachers
than any other department in the College of Liberal Arts. Three
whose careers spanned several decades were Edna Hayes (Taylor),
Agnes Virginia Harlow, and Ermina Murlin Mills.
 
The first to join the DePauw teaching staff was Edna Hayes, a graduate
of Denison University with teaching experience there and at the
high school level. She was appointed an instructor of English composition
and rhetoric in 1918. Four years later she married James Taylor
and left the university to raise a family. After her husband's death
in 1935 she returned to DePauw to teach in the new English department,
which combined both composition and literature. She earned an M.A.
from Ohio State University in 1939. Known to generations of students
as Mrs. Shakespeare for her devotion to the Bard of Avon, she was
an inspirational and beloved teacher. Former students contributed
to a fund to send her to England in the summer of 1952 for the coronation
of Queen Elizabeth II. An ardent Anglophile, she wrote two prize-winning
coronation poems while there. Professor Taylor retired in 1956 but
continued to teach part-time for another decade and spent one year
as a visiting instructor at the American Collegiate Institute in
Turkey. She died in 1984.
 
Virginia Harlow came to DePauw in 1919 after two years of teaching
at the State Normal School in Shippensburg, Pa. A graduate of Mount
Holyoke in the same class as Anna Olmstead (Raphael), who joined
the faculty in the same year as a member of the Romance languages
department, she later earned an M.A. from the University of California
and Ph.D. from Duke. Her doctoral dissertation, published by Duke
University Press, was highly praised by literary historians. She
was a demanding teacher, thorough in her scholarship and lucid in
class presentation. In 1952 she was chosen to succeed veteran Raymond
W. Pence as head of the English department, the first woman to hold
that post. Reaching the mandatory age of retirement in 1956, Professor
Harlow remained active in teaching both at DePauw and abroad for
several years, including stints as a Fulbright-Hays lecturer at
Hiroshima University in Japan and visiting professor of English
at Seoul National University in Korea. She died in Greencastle in
1977.
The youngest of the three, Ermina Murlin Mills, was a graduate of
Cornell College in Iowa who was brought to DePauw in 1928 as an
assistant to Professor Francis Tilden in the department of comparative
literature. The daughter of Henry A. Mills, former dean of the DePauw
School of Art, she had earned an M.A. at Boston University and taught
seven years at her alma mater, Cornell College. She was a prodigious
reader who combined a knowledge of history and sociology in her
interpretation of modern literature. Professor Mills remained a
member of the comparative literature department until 1940, when
upon Tilden's retirement it was combined with the English department.
Transferring there she taught general European as well as English
and American literature for two more decades. After her retirement
in 1960 she continued to teach part-time for a few years before
moving to Colorado, where she still makes her home.
Other women with shorter tenures at DePauw who made significant
contributions to the teaching of English were: Lillian B. Brownfield,
1922-40; Judith K. Sollenberger, 1924-34; Mary Glenn Hamilton, 1928-34;
Mary L. Fraley, 1938-48; Jean Butler Sanders, 1946-50, 1951-58;
Marian Shalkhauser (Brock), 1955-57, 1961-65; and Elizabeth Ann
Christman, 1969-76. Women are still well represented in the English
department, which today includes Cynthia E. Cornell, Martha Rainbolt,
Erin McGraw, and Jesse Lee Kercheval. The roster of part-time teachers
who have served the department long and well contains the names
of several others: Kathleen L. Steele, Julia D. Knuppel, Christina
T. Biggs, and Ann L. Weiss.
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