Cora Agnes Benneson

In 1886, she briefly worked as an editor of West Publishing's law reports before taking up a history fellowship at Bryn Mawr College under then-professor Woodrow Wilson.

[1] According to her biographer, the mathematician and sociologist Mary Esther Trueblood, Benneson was raised in "a large mansion situated above a series of terraces, surrounded by trees and shrubs, and commanding a magnificent view of fourteen miles of the Mississippi".

[2] The youngest of four sisters (and a cousin whom her parents raised), Benneson "was a sturdy child, orderly, accurate, self-reliant, ambitious, and persevering".

As an undergraduate student, Benneson was part of a community of women who would go on to have successful careers, including her friend Alice Freeman Palmer.

She was a successful public speaker—defending, in her first year, the proposition that Homer was the author of the Iliad—and served as the first female editor on the editorial board of The Chronicle, which was at the time the university's leading newspaper.

[12] In 1883, Benneson—who was interested in foreign legal cultures and the status of women—began a two-year and four-month world tour, alongside an unknown young woman from Massachusetts.

[13] From San Francisco, "she traveled continually westward, visiting Hawaii, Japan, China, Burma, India, Arabia, Abyssinia, Egypt, Palestine, Turkey, and all of the principal countries of Europe".

[14] According to Trueblood, Benneson's tour was "an extended study of the customs, manners, and laws of many nations", and "doors", "both ... to the home and to the heart", "opened easily" to her.

[15] In seeking to observe foreign legal cultures, Benneson visited the courts and "governing assemblies" of "the principal civilized countries".

[16] Benneson's journey also brought "thrilling incidents", including: a camping expedition in the Yosemite; horseback rides over the lava tracts to the Burning Lakes and down and up the steep walls of the gulches of Hawaii; the tour of Canton under English escort at the time of the Tonquin War; the elephant and dromedary rides in India and Egypt; the sight of the famous Highland regiment, the Black Watch, marching out to battle, and the sound of the artillery fire of the British squares; a journey with pilgrims returning after Easter from Jerusalem to Damascus; an adventure with brigands in Greece; the coming unawares upon the breathing Hermes of Praxiteles just unearthed; the mountain climbing in Switzerland; the exploration of the Norwegian fjords.

[17]Benneson described her travels in letters, notes, and diary entries, which were published in 1890 in The Unitarian magazine as part of a series called "Palestine To-day".

[22] Starting in Quincy, where she gave 17 talks, Trueblood wrote that "[h]er lectures, everywhere well attended, were found instructive by those who had traveled as well as by those who had not, for with her trained mind and keen perception she was able to give an interpretation as well as a narration of facts.

She moved to Bryn Mawr College in 1887 for a history fellowship under then-professor Woodrow Wilson, who described her as "a pleasant small person of mind which it will be very hard, but I trust not impossible, to impress".

[29] Benneson lectured and published throughout her life, writing papers and delivering talks on constitutional law, education, government, and culture.