Elizabeth Powell Bond
educator and social activist
Elizabeth Powell Bond (January 25, 1841 – March 29, 1926) was an educator and social activist who was the first Dean of Women at Swarthmore College.
Family and education
Elizabeth Powell was born in 1841 in Clinton, New York, to a Quaker couple, Catherine Macy Powell and Townsend Powell. Her father was a farmer, and when she was four, the family moved to a farm in Ghent. By the age of 15, she was serving as an assistant teacher at a Friends’ School in the county. She graduated at the age of seventeen from the State Normal School in Albany. Her brother married educator and activist Anna Rice Powell in 1861.
Like many Quakers, she held strong views against slavery and was a suffragist, peace activist, and temperance reformer. At the age of 16, she was speaking out at local meetings of anti-slavery campaigners. She spent some time in the household of the abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison before her marriage.
In 1872, she married Henry Herrick Bond, a lawyer from Northampton, Massachusetts.
The public source identifies “Elizabeth Powell Bond” as educator and social activist. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Elizabeth, Powell and Bond.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Dec 26, 2025. The linked authority identifier is Q28366415. VIAF identifies the subject as 13933349. The Library of Congress control number is n90666559. 3 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1841, 1926, 1861 and 1872.
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This entry incorporates text from “Elizabeth Powell Bond” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.