Frances Melville
Scottish academic & suffragist
Frances Helen Melville (11 October 1873 – 7 March 1962), was a Scottish suffragist, advocate for higher education for women in Scotland, and one of the first women to matriculate at the University of Edinburgh in 1892. She was president of the British Federation of University Women from 1935 to 1942.
Early life
Melville was born in Merchiston in Edinburgh, the elder daughter of Francis Suther Melville, a depute clerk of the Court of Session, and Helen Alexandrina Kerr. Melville was one of seven children; five brothers and two sister. She spent her childhood in Edinburgh, where she was educated at George Watson's Ladies' College and later studied music for a year in Germany.
Education
Following the 1889 Universities (Scotland) Act which allowed women to graduate from universities in Scotland, Melville became one of the first women to matriculate at the University of Edinburgh in 1892. She graduated five years later in 1897 with a first class MA Honours degree in Philosophy. In 1910 Melville was awarded a Bachelor of Divinity degree by the University of St Andrews, the first woman in Scotland to graduate with this degree.
Academic career
Following graduation, Melville worked as a tutor at the University of Edinburgh from 1896 to 1899, where she taught classes on logic, psychology, and metaphysics run by Professor Andrew Seth Pringle-Pattinson. From 1899 to 1909 Melville held the post of Warden of University Hall at the University of St Andrews.
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This entry incorporates text from “Frances Melville” 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.