Millicent Fenwick
Millicent Fenwick, the great-granddaughter of the founder of Stevens, Edwin A. Stevens, was born in 1910 and served in a variety of notable roles during her lifetime.
Fenwick did not receive a high school diploma or a college degree, but she attended classes at Columbia University and studied philosophy under British philosopher and Nobel Prize winner Bertrand Russell. She was also fluent in French, Italian, and Spanish.
Following a divorce from her husband, Fenwick was left in a poor financial state, but she refused to take money from her family and had to scrape by to support her two children.
She briefly modeled for Harper’s Bazaar and then had two short stories published, which led to a job offering as an associate editor on the staff of Condé Nast’s Vogue magazine. She remained in this role from 1938 to 1952 and in 1948 wrote Vogue’s Book of Etiquette, which sold over one million copies.
Politics piqued Fenwick’s interest as she was exposed to the struggles of African American people in America and the oppression in Nazi Germany. Her first time publically speaking about political issues was an effort to combat anti-Semitic propaganda in the U.S. through the National Conference of Christians and Jews. Fenwick continued her role as an activist by joining the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People in 1946.
Fenwick soon became an active participant in local politics. She worked on a Senate campaign, served on the Bernardsville, New Jersey Board of Education, chaired the Somerset County Legal Aid Society and the Bernardsville Recreation Commission, and served as a member of the Bernardsville Borough Council, as well as the New Jersey Committee to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights.
In 1970, at the age of 59, Fenwick ran for state office for the first time and won a seat in the New Jersey assembly. She served for several years, until the New Jersey Governor appointed her as the state’s first Director of Consumer Affairs.
In 1974, Fenwick took a swing at federal politics, running as the Republican candidate of New Jersey’s fifth district to serve in the House of Representatives, an election which she also won. Despite having been born 10 years before women gained the right to vote, Fenwick ended up serving four terms in the U.S. House of Representatives. She served on a plethora of committees and advocated for human rights, thus helping create the Helsinki Agreement on Human Rights and writing a bill which created the U.S. Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe.
After losing an election for senator, Fenwick left the Congressional office and was appointed as the U.S Ambassador for the United Nations Agencies for Food and Agriculture.
Despite her active political career, Fenwick never forgot her ties to the Stevens family and served on the Board of Trustees of Stevens Insitute of Technology.
Martha Bayard Stevens
Martha Bayard Stevens, a descendant of the Bayard family, was born in 1831, and after marrying into the Stevens family, re-acquired land previously owned by her family which would later become the foundation of the Stevens campus.
The Bayard family came to the United States before the American Revolution, but later fled the country after the British lost the Revolution. The land was acquired by the U.S. Government and later bought at auction by Colonel John Stevens, a relative of Martha Bayard Stevens’ husband Edwin A. Stevens.
Martha Bayard Stevens married Edwin A. Stevens and reacquired the land previously lost by her family. Both her and her husband were dedicated philanthropists; Edwin A. Stevens bequeathed part of his estate for a university upon his death. In contrast, Martha Bayard Stevens dedicated her contributions to the entire Hoboken community. Within Hoboken, she helped erect a memorial church, started an Industrial School, secured the construction of a library, and contributed greatly to hospitals. She also gave anything that was left of her income to charity. She was a familiar face within Hoboken.
In 1892, Martha Bayard Stevens was one of the two women to serve on the New Jersey Commission to represent the state at the World’s Fair in Chicago in 1892.
With her family by her side, Bayard Stevens died on April 1s, 1899 after suffering a stroke. “She was beloved by the poor of Hoboken who greatly mourned her death.”
Emmi Hauser Fischl
“A soft voiced, pretty young woman who grew up in Nazi Germany as the daughter of a Bavarian clothing merchant and at 17 became one of the million war refugees has just been appointed the first woman teacher in the 77-year history of Stevens Institute of Technology” —The Newark Star-Ledger, 1947
At age 25, Emmi Hauser Fischl was hired in 1947 to teach Physics at Stevens Institute of Technology. She was the first female faculty member at Stevens 24 years before women were first admitted to Stevens in 1971. Fischl continued to teach at Stevens until her first child was born. Later in life, after she no longer needed to watch over her children, Fischl began to study computer programming and worked as a programmer in Fortran, a scientific computer language. She pursued these technical fields simply because “she liked it.” Nearing her 100th birthday, Fischl currently resides in Florida.
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