Fannie Fern Phillips Andrews
Fannie Fern Phillips Andrews was a prominent peace activist and educator born in Margaretville, Nova Scotia, Canada, in 1862. She grew up in a large family in Lynn, Massachusetts, where her mother's reformist ideals profoundly influenced her. After graduating from the Salem Normal School and teaching for several years, Andrews earned a B.A. from Radcliffe College in 1902. Throughout her life, she dedicated herself to promoting peace through education, founding the American School Peace League in 1908, which aimed to integrate principles of international justice into school curricula.
Andrews was actively involved in international peace initiatives, particularly during World War I, and participated in the Paris Peace Conference in 1918. Although she was disappointed that her vision for an international bureau of education was not realized at that time, she continued to contribute to educational and diplomatic efforts throughout her life. In the late 1930s, she was appointed by President Franklin D. Roosevelt as a delegate to meetings of an established international bureau of education. Andrews published several works, including her autobiography, "Memory Pages of My Life," in 1948, where she expressed hope for a peaceful future through organizations like UNESCO. She passed away in 1950 and is buried in Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Subject Terms
Fannie Fern Phillips Andrews
- Fannie Andrews
- Born: September 25, 1867
- Died: January 23, 1950
Peace activist through education, was born in Margaretville, Nova Scotia, Canada, the second daughter of William Wallace Phillips and Anna Maria (Brown) Phillips. She grew up in Lynn, Massachusetts, where her father made shoes, in a family that included her twin brother and five other brothers and sisters.
Fannie Phillips may have absorbed much of her reforming zeal from her mother, who was an active Baptist and a member of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union. In any event, after graduating from the Salem (Massachusetts) Normal School in 1884, she became a teacher and thereby fulfilled a goal developed at the age of three. She taught for six years before going to Radcliffe College, where she earned a B.A. in 1902, when thirty-four years old, in education and psychology.
In 1890 Phillips married Edwin Gasper Andrews (1858-1935), a salesman from Lynn, who encouraged and supported her educational and international activities. They had no children.
Having organized Boston school parents’ groups since the early 1900s, Fannie Andrews was president of the Boston Home and School Association from 1914 to 1918. In 1908 she founded the American School Peace League, which sought to promote peace by introducing principles of “international justice” into the curricula of American schools. (In 1918 the latter organization, fearing that its name might prove too provocative for a country at war, changed its name to the American School Citizenship League.) By 1915, Andrews had generated enough enthusiasm for her ideas—the league had branches in approximately forty states—to get serious consideration at the highest levels of government for her plan to create an international bureau of education. She was in the final stages of gathering support for a multinational conference to establish such a body when World War I broke out, killing the nascent scheme.
Throughout the war Andrews worked with the League to Enforce Peace and joined an international group called the Central Organization for a Durable Peace, which issued a nine-point program to end the war and create an agency of cooperation among nations. Under the Central Organization’s auspices, she published The Freedom of the Seas (1917). For the most part, she supported President Woodrow Wilson’s war policies.
In 1918 Wilson picked Andrews to attend the Paris Peace Conference. She hoped that the covenant of the new League of Nations would create an international bureau of education and was disappointed when it did not. In the 1920s, however, such a bureau was established, and President Franklin D. Roosevelt appointed her to be an official delegate to its meetings in 1934 and 1936.
During the First World War, Andrews returned to Radcliffe for postgraduate study in international affairs. Participation in the Paris Peace Conference stimulated her interest in the system of mandates set up to govern former colonies; and she wrote her doctoral dissertation on the subject in 1923, receiving a Ph.D. in that year. To explain how the mandate system worked in a particularly troubled area of the world, Andrews later wrote The Holy Land under Mandate (2 vols., 1931), a thorough account of the conflicting claims to Palestine.
Around the 1930s she began gathering material for a study on international diplomacy that was never completed. In 1948 Andrews brought out her autobiography, Memory Pages of My Life, the last two sentences of which expressed the faith that had guided her existence. “UNESCO has arrived!” she wrote. “We now have the ingredients for a peaceful world!”
Fannie Andrews died from arteriosclerosis in a Somerville, Massachusetts, nursing home. She was buried at Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Andrews’s papers are housed in the Schlesinger Library at Radcliffe College; they include pamphlets and clippings by and about her. After her aforementioned autobiography, the best place for biographical information is Notable American Women (1971). See also the National Cyclopaedia of American Biography (1924).