The University of Arizona Press

A native of Iowa, Theresa Russell (1873–1936) was one of the first female professors of English and philosophy at Stanford University, having escaped the poorly paid elementary teaching ghetto reserved for educated women in 1900 through her fierce intellectual ability and social acumen. Before beginning her Stanford tenure in 1906, she was a high school teacher in Anamosa and married Harvard professor and Arctic explorer Frank Russell, one of the first PhDs in anthropology. Theresa studied at Radcliffe College and became a protegee of William James, the most famous philosopher and psychologist of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Her dozens of publications on authors like H. G. Wells, Edith Wharton, and Robert Browning are still respected in literary criticism.