Jessie Donaldson Hodder

The following year, the family returned to the United States and moved to Rosemont, Pennsylvania, where Alfred taught English literature at Bryn Mawr College until 1898.

Meanwhile, Alfred, known as the "Byron of Bryn Mawr," was engaged in an affair with Miss Mary Mackall Gwinn, another English professor, who was the live-in companion and lover of the Dean and President of the College, Martha Carey Thomas.

[6] In 1898, insisting that the affair was over, Alfred Hodder put his common-law wife, Jessie, and their two children on a ship from New York back to Germany, promising to join them.

[7] Jessie remained abroad for eight years, supporting herself and the children as a pianist, English translator, and teacher, living first in Leipzig and then in the village of Cormondrèche, Neuchâtel, Switzerland.

Depressed and destitute, Jessie considered suicide, but eventually she and her son returned to the United States thanks to the generosity of a friend of Alice James, philanthropist and social reformer Elizabeth Glendower Evans.

[11] Under her regime, the Massachusetts Reformatory took the lead in the United States in the study of the individual prisoner and importance of detailed case records.

Aware of rapidly unfolding developments in psychology and the social sciences and of Katharine Bement Davis' experiments at the New York Reformatory for Women, Jessie Hodder insisted on medical and psychiatric examinations and repeatedly requested funds for a resident psychiatrist.

After her death, her successor, Miriam Van Waters, built two stand-alone houses separate from the Reformatory and a third new, large building exclusively for inmates between the ages of 17 and 21.

"[13] Jessie Hodder died of chronic myocarditis at her home in the Framingham Reformatory in 1931, at the age of sixty-four, surrounded by her son, his wife, and her three grandchildren.