Sophonisba Preston Breckinridge

• Sophonisba Preston Breckinridge
• Born: April 1, 1866
• Died: July 30, 1948

Social worker and educator, was born in Lexington, Kentucky, the second of seven children and the second daughter of William Campbell Preston Breckinridge—lawyer, Confederate colonel, United States congressman—and his second wife, Issa (Desha) Breckinridge. Her great-grandfather, John Breckinridge, was a U.S. senator who served as attorney general under President Thomas Jefferson. Sophonisba Breckinridge grew up in an aristocratic southern environment, with a long family tradition of public service.

Since her father, a liberal Presbyterian and a champion of rights for blacks, was also a staunch supporter of women’s education, Isba, as she was known to her family, attended Wellesley College, graduating in 1888. She taught mathematics for several years in a high school in Washington, D.C., but went back to Kentucky in 1894 after her father lost his congressional seat. Despite family opposition, she began studying law in her father’s office. In 1895 she passed the state bar examination, becoming the first woman lawyer to practice in Kentucky.

Her legal career was not successful. In the latter part of 1895 she gave it up and became an assistant to Marion Talbot, dean of women at the University of Chicago. Talbot encouraged her to pursue graduate studies in political science, and in 1901 she received a doctorate upon completion of her thesis, Legal Tender: A Study in English and American Monetary History. She immediately entered the law school from which she was graduated in 1904. Remaining at the university, she became an instructor in the department of household administration, teaching courses on the legal and economic facets of family living. In 1912 she coauthored with Talbot The Modern Household, her first major work.

Teaching and administration did not totally fulfill Breckinridge. She became interested in social work during 1905 after meeting Jane Ad-dams, Hull House founder, Margaret Dreier Robins, a member of the Women’s Trade Union League, and others who were involved in Chicago’s progressive era social reform or research. In 1907 she moved to Hull House, the first settlement house in America, where she lived most of the time until 1920. At the same time she taught at the Chicago School of Civics and Philanthropy, which had been established in 1903 for the education of social workers. She became dean, and took charge of its department of research in 1908. Her assistant at this time was Edith Abbott, another resident of Hull House, and the two women, using their extensive firsthand knowledge of the Chicago slums, collaborated on several books that provided detailed data and analyses on social conditions in these areas. The books were The Delinquent Child and the Home (1912), Truancy and Non-Attendance in the Chicago Schools (1917), New Homes for Old (1921), and The Tenements of Chicago (1936).

Breckinridge also became involved in a variety of reform activities. She worked as a municipal health inspector, wrote the summary report on Chicago’s juvenile court system, served as a director of Illinois’s Consumers League, and was the first secretary of the Immigrants’ Protective League, which she helped establish in 1908. She was also an active member of the National Assertion for the Advancement of Colored People.

Breckinridge’s concern with the welfare of working women, evident in articles she wrote on the employment of women in The Journal of Political Economy, led to her involvement with :he Women’s Trade Union League and to her support for legislation regulating wages and hours of women’s employment. Turning her attention to the conditions of children employed in industry, she became a consultant to the United States Children’s Bureau and campaigned for national child labor laws.

A feminist, Breckinridge was an active participant in the women’s rights movement. In 1911, she became a vice president of the National American Woman Suffrage Association, served on the national board of the American Association of University Women, and was an early president of the Woman’s City Club of Chicago. Her work helped to change the orientation of the woman’s club movement from a mainly social role to active involvement in many areas of reform.

Interested in politics since her youth, Breckinridge was a member of the platform committee of the Progressive party in 1912, and campaigned actively for its candidates. Although she never called herself a pacifist, she worked for the peace movement and in 1915 was one of the organizers of the Woman’s Peace party.

Despite the wide range of her involvement, Breckinridge’s main contributions were concentrated in the field of education. In 1920, in a move she was instrumental in arranging, the Chicago School of Civics and Philanthropy was taken over by the University of Chicago and became the Graduate School of Social Service Administration. Working with her old colleague, Edith Abbott, who had been appointed dean of the school in 1924, Breckinridge, now an associate professor of social economy, helped develop the graduate school into one of the country’s leading institutions for the education of social workers. The curriculum, which stressed research and administration, emphasized her conviction that social workers must be fully trained.

In 1927 she helped establish the Social Service Review, a scholarly journal of social work, of which she was editor until her death in 1948. She was selected to be president at the American Association of Schools of Social Work in 1934. It was her firm belief that the success of social welfare programs demanded the involvement of federal and state governments. This idea, which did not gain acceptance until the presidency of Franklin D. Roosevelt, was addressed in her publications Family Welfare Work in a Metropolitan Community (1924), Public Welfare Administration (1927), and The Family and the State (1934). Her students in the 1930s became social workers as well as administrators for the New Deal’s public welfare programs, spreading the ideas, methods, and techniques from her curriculum at the graduate school.

Never married, Sophonisba Breckinridge retired from the University of Chicago in 1942 but continued to write and teach almost up to the time she died. Her death in Chicago at the age of eighty-two was due to a perforated ulcer and arteriosclerosis. Her ashes were buried in Lexington, Kentucky.

Sophonisba Breckinridge’s papers are at the Library of Congress. Her publications include The Housing Problem in Chicago, ed. with E. Abbott, 10 vols. (1910-15); The Child in the City (1912), a series of papers that she edited; A Summary of Juvenile-Court Legislation in the United States (1920); Madeline McDowell Breckinridge: A Leader in the New South (1921); Marriage and the Civic Rights of Women; (1931); Women in the Twentieth Century: A Study of Their Political, Social and Economic Activities (1933); and The Illinois Poor Law and Its Administration (1939). There is no full-length biography; her life must be pieced together from scattered accounts. The best modern sketch is in Notable American Women (1971). See also The Dictionary of American Biography, supplement 4 (1974). Useful articles include A. R. Travis, “Sophonisba Breckinridge, Militant Feminist,” Mid-America, April-July 1976; H. R. Wright, “Three Against Time,” Social Service Review, March 1954; E. Abbott, “Sophonisba Preston Breckinridge Over the Years,” Social Service Review, December 1948; and K. F. Lenroot, “Sophonisba Preston Breckinridge, Social Pioneer,” Social Service Review, March and September 1949. An obituary appeared in The New York Times, July 31, 1948.