Elaine Ryan Hedges
American feminist
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Early life
Elaine Ryan was born on August 18, 1927, in Yonkers, New York to John Aloysius and Catherine Mary Ryan. Graduating from Gorton High School in Yonkers in 1944, she went on to further her education at Barnard College. She graduated summa cum laude in 1948, moving on to obtain a Master of Arts in history from Radcliffe College in 1950. That same year, she worked at Harvard University as a grader for Perry Miler in the American literature department, where she met fellow student William Hedges. Between 1951 and 1956, she taught at Harvard and Wellesley College, before she and Hedges married in 1956 and relocated to Baltimore, Maryland.
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Career
Hedges taught at San Francisco State College, the University of California at Berkeley and Goucher College and had two children, over the next few years. In 1967, she joined the faculty at Towson State University and then completed her PhD at Harvard in 1970. She taught English and founded the Women's Studies Program at Towson in 1972. Towson developed an interdisciplinary program to transform the curricula of 13 disciplines to incorporate education on women and worked with Sara Coulter to promote a similar model in five of Maryland's area community colleges. Directing the program for nearly 20 years, Hedges fostered a nationwide program to initiate women's studies in universities and colleges and shared her expertise abroad in Beijing, China, as a visiting professor at the Freie Universitat in Berlin, Germany, and at conferences in Toronto, Canada.
Hedges was a founding member of the National Women's Studies Association and a member of the American Association of University Professors, the Modern Language Association of America, and the Women's Caucus for the Modern Languages. In 1988, she was awarded The Feminist Press Award for Contributions to Women's Culture.
Hedges died June 5, 1997, in Baltimore, Maryland, and was inducted into the Maryland Women's Hall of Fame the following year.