Child also played sports while attending Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts, from which she graduated in 1934 with a major in history.

[6] Following her graduation from college, Child moved to New York City, where she worked for a time as a copywriter for the advertising department of W. & J. Sloane.

[12][13][14] As a research assistant in the Secret Intelligence division, Child typed over 10,000 names on white note cards to keep track of officers.

"[16] During 1944–1945, Child was posted to Kandy, Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), where her responsibilities included "registering, cataloging and channeling a great volume of highly classified communications" for the OSS's clandestine stations in Asia.

[17][18] She was later posted to Kunming, China, where she received the Emblem of Meritorious Civilian Service as head of the Registry of the OSS Secretariat.

The two later married on September 1, 1946, in Lumberville, Pennsylvania,[20] later moving to Washington, D.C.. Paul, a New Jersey native[21] who had lived in Paris as an artist and poet, was known for his sophisticated palate[22] and had introduced his wife to fine cuisine.

Once, she had described the meal of oysters, sole meunière, and fine wine to The New York Times as "an opening up of the soul and spirit for me."

In 1951, she graduated from the famous Cordon Bleu cooking school in Paris and later studied privately with Max Bugnard and other master chefs.

[23] She joined the women's cooking club Le Cercle des Gourmettes, through which she met Simone Beck, who was writing a French cookbook for Americans with her friend Louisette Bertholle.

For the next decade, as the Childs moved around Europe and finally to Cambridge, Massachusetts, the three researched and repeatedly tested recipes.

In 1963, the Childs built a home near the Provence town of Plascassier in the hills above Cannes on property belonging to co-author Beck and her husband, Jean Fischbacher.

[25] The three would-be authors initially signed a contract with publisher Houghton Mifflin, which later rejected the manuscript for seeming too much like an encyclopedia.

Lauded for its helpful illustrations and precise attention to detail, and for making fine cuisine accessible, the book is still in print and is considered a seminal culinary work.

A 1961 appearance on a book review show on what was then the National Educational Television (NET) station of Boston, WGBH-TV (now a major Public Broadcasting Service station),[28] led to the inception of her first television cooking show after viewers enjoyed her demonstration of how to cook an omelette.

She attracted the broadest audience with her cheery enthusiasm, distinctively warbly voice, and unpatronizing, unaffected manner.

It was soon followed in 1970 by Mastering the Art of French Cooking, Volume Two, again in collaboration with Simone Beck, but not with Louisette Bertholle, with whom the professional relationship had ended.

Because of the technology in the 1960s, the show was unedited, causing her blunders to appear in the final version and ultimately lend "authenticity and approachability to television.

In addition, Miller notes that Child's show began before the feminist movement of the 1960s, which meant that the issues housewives and women faced were somewhat ignored on television.

In 1989, she published what she considered her magnum opus, a book and instructional video series collectively entitled The Way To Cook.

It is now on display at the National Museum of American History in Washington, D.C. Beginning with In Julia's Kitchen with Master Chefs, the Childs' home kitchen in Cambridge was fully transformed into a functional set, with TV-quality lighting, three cameras positioned to catch all angles in the room, and a massive center island with a gas stovetop on one side and an electric stovetop on the other, but leaving the rest of the Childs' appliances alone, including "my wall oven with its squeaking door.

American journalist Bob Spitz spent a brief time with Child during that period while he was researching and writing his then working title, History of Eating and Cooking in America.

[48] She donated her kitchen, which her husband had designed with high counters to accommodate her height, and which served as the set for three of her television series, to the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History, where it is now on display.

[51] The grants support primarily gastronomy, the culinary arts, and the further development of the professional food world, all matters of paramount importance to Julia Child during her lifetime.

[57] Smith College used the proceeds from the sale of Child's house in Cambridge to partially fund an architecturally dramatic campus center that opened in 2003.

Her great success on air may have been tied to her refreshingly pragmatic approach to the genre, "I think you have to decide who your audience is.