King, Lida Shaw

Lida Shaw King (1868-1932), third dean of the Women’s College, was born in Boston on September 15, 1868. She was the daughter of the Reverend Henry Melville King, pastor of the First Baptist Church in Providence from 1891 to 1906, and was descended through her paternal grandmother from John Alden of Plymouth and the Mayflower. She graduated from Vassar College in 1890, and received a master of arts degree from Brown in 1894, the first year that any degrees were awarded to women. She returned to Vassar for more graduate study and taught classical subjects there from 1894 to 1897. In 1897-98 she was a graduate student at Radcliffe College. Between 1898 and 1902 she was at the Packer Collegiate Institute, first as a teacher of ancient languages and later as director of the Department of Latin and Greek. She studied at the American School of Archaeology in Athens as a Bryn Mawr Fellow in 1899 and again as the Agnes Hoppin Memorial Fellow in 1900. She and fellow student Ida Thallon were the first women to excavate on the mainland of Greece, and their work at the Nymph’s Cave at Vari resulted in an article, “Vases, Terra-Cotta Statuettes, Bronzes and Miscellaneous Objects Found in the Cave at Vari,” which appeared in the Journal of the Archaeological Institute in 1903. She was inaugurated as third dean of the Women’s College on October 25, 1905, following the resignation of Anne Crosby Emery. At the same time she was named assistant professor of classical philology. Her title was changed in 1909 to professor of classical literature and archaeology. Her success was such that it was noticed by other institutions. In “Topics of the Month” in the June 1909 Brown Alumni Monthly it was recorded:

“Miss Lida Shaw King (Vassar, ’90), dean of the Women’s College, has gratified the college and the community by declining at least one offer outside of Providence. We are assured from university sources that there is no impropriety in saying (though Miss King has made no statement on this point), that the position of dean of Barnard College, New York, a much more lucrative place, was offered to her, but refused on the ground that there is a great work to be done here in Providence, a work worthy of the best efforts of any intelligent and earnest woman. It shows, on the part of Miss King, a fine faith in the Woman’s College.”