Jessie Wallace Hughan
American activist (1875–1955)
Jessie Wallace Hughan (December 25, 1875 – April 10, 1955) was an American educator, a socialist activist, and a radical pacifist. During her college days she was one of four co-founders of Alpha Omicron Pi, a national fraternity for university women. She was the founder and first Secretary of the War Resisters League, established in 1923. For over two decades, she was a perennial candidate for political office on the ticket of the Socialist Party of America in her home state of New York.
Early life and education
Jessie Wallace Hughan was born December 25, 1875, in Brooklyn, New York City. She was the third of four children born to Margaret and Samuel Hughan, who were of Scottish, English, and French ancestry. Her father was an accountant.
Hughan attended grammar school on Staten Island, and then went on to Northfield Seminary, a theologically liberal Unitarian college preparatory school for girls located in Northfield, Massachusetts.
Hughan enrolled at Barnard College in New York City in 1894. In January 1897 she co-founded there with three other students the international sorority Alpha Omicron Pi.
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This entry incorporates text from “Jessie Wallace Hughan” 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.