Esther Biddle Rhoads
American educator (1896–1979)
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Through World War II
Early life and education
Rhoads was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, the daughter of Edward Garrett Rhoads and Margaret Ely Paxson Rhoads. Her family were Quakers; her father was a physician. She attended Germantown Friends School, Drexel Institute, and in 1921 completed a bachelor's degree at Earlham College in Indiana. In 1927 she earned a master's degree in religious education from Teachers College, Columbia University.
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Career
Rhoads went to teach in Japan in 1917, at the Friends Girls School in Tokyo. At the school, she also coached sports, directed student theatrical productions, and oversaw a dormitory. She and her mother were in Tokyo for the Great Kantō Earthquake in 1923. She left Japan in 1940. During the war, she worked in California with the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) and used her Japanese language and cultural understanding to support Japanese-Americans incarcerated in internment camps.
After the war, Rhoads returned to Japan, as commissioner of Licensed Agencies for Relief in Asia (LARA). In 1949, became principal of the Friends Girls School in Tokyo. She also tutored Crown Prince Akihito, from 1950 to 1960. She left her Japan posts in 1960. In retirement, Rhoads went to Tunisia, to work with the AFSC in to provide humanitarian relief to refugees of the Algerian War.
Rhoads received the Fourth Order of the Sacred Treasure in 1952, from Emperor Hirohito; she received the Third Order of the Sacred Treasure upon her retirement in 1960. She also held the highest decoration given by the Japanese Red Cross Society, and was presented with symbolic keys to the city of Tokyo. A biography, Footprints of a Quaker, was published in Japanese.
Personal life
Rhoads died in 1979, in Germantown, Pennsylvania, at the age of 82. A large collection of her papers is held in the Haverford College Libraries' Quaker & Special Collections.